What Blue Velvet did for the comforting myths of suburban innocence, The Reflecting Skin attempted to do for rural America. With its picturesque farmhouses and golden-hued fields of wheat that seem to have popped straight out of an Andrew Wyeth painting, the world of Philip Ridley’s 1990 film evokes a warm feeling of nostalgia, but there’s an evil lurking just below the surface, one that reveals itself in ways both monumental (the atomic bomb) and minute (the mummified corpse of an infant abandoned in an old church).
The film is filled with odd, haunting images and occurrences—an exploding frog, a duo of creepy clucking women, a photograph of a Japanese child with literally mirrored skin—all of which the audience experiences through the eyes of young Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper). The eight-year-old lives on the Idaho prairie with his harsh, overworked mother, Ruth (Sheila Moore), and distant father, Luke (Duncan Fraser), a closeted gay man who spends most of his time sitting around reading pulp novels.
A strange, improbably named widow, Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan), has just moved in next door, and Seth soon comes to believe she’s a vampire, a suspicion that’s intensified when Seth’s brother, Cameron (Viggo Mortensen), returns from military duty and strikes up a romantic relationship with the older woman. And as if all this weren’t dark and disturbing enough, the film takes an even bleaker turn with the disappearance of Seth’s pal, Eben (Codie Lucas Wilbee), and the subsequent allegation that Seth’s dad is to blame.
Ridley peppers his pitch-black narrative with a vast array of themes, symbols, and motifs—skin, birds, water, nuclear warfare, and death—but the film’s exact meaning remains elusive. In part, that’s due to the filmmaker’s admirable refusal to spell out a message or reduce The Reflecting Skin’s meaning to some one-note allegory, but it’s also due to his muddled direction. Ridley’s handling of actors is particularly weak, as everyone except Mortensen and Duncan suggests overemphatic community theater performers. It also doesn’t help that the film’s tantalizing ambiguity is consistently steam-rolled by Nick Bicât’s overwrought score.
Still, it’s exciting to see a film attempt to strike such a distinct tone of fabulistic terror, and Ridley manages to achieve a number of evocative moments of weirdness and discomfort. Seth’s late-night conversations with the petrified baby corpse he imagines to be Eben’s angelic incarnation perfectly encapsulate the film’s eerie juxtaposition of childlike naïveté and disturbing horror. Ridley uses a black Cadillac full of child-nabbing greasers to symbolize death—a risky choice to be sure, but one whose effect is oddly disquieting, evoking the mysterious real-life missing-persons cases involving young children.
Deep into the film’s narrative, it’s revealed that Cameron participated in the atomic bomb tests in the Pacific, which have left him with radiation poisoning that weakens his bones and makes his hair fall out—signs which Seth misinterprets to be the effects of Dolphin’s witchy spells. This invocation of deadly weapons of mass destruction injects a disturbing layer of geopolitical terror into the film’s secluded rural milieu. Ridley envisions a vast globe-encompassing evil unleashed by the detonation of nuclear weapons, anticipating a similar theme that Lynch would explore in Twin Peaks: The Return.
If Ridley’s ambitious attempt to weave a complex web of themes and symbols within his work is significantly less successful than Lynch’s, one can still admire The Reflecting Skin for its uncanny aura, nightmare-logic plotting, and the sheer loopiness of its ideas. Even in its most strained and over-reaching moments, the film achieves a beguiling contrast between its sumptuous rural images and the darkness of its subject matter, one that’s neatly summed up by Ridley’s original title for his screenplay: American Gothic.
Image/Sound
If the colors throughout The Reflecting Skin appear overly saturated on Film Movement’s Blu-ray release of the film, rest assured that the grading is true to Philip Ridley’s original vision. As the director explains in a note included in the booklet, he met resistance for pushing the colors too far during the recent 2K restoration of the film. But the hyper-real yellows of the wheat fields and dazzlingly bright blues of the prairie skies are key to the film’s surreal effect, and they positively blaze off the screen in this 1080p transfer. The LPCM 2.0 audio track is rich and full; subtle details of the film’s sound design (birds chirping, wind blowing) are crystal clear, and when Nick Bicât’s booming score starts to swell, it positively fills the room.
Extras
Film Movement’s release is sadly light on special features, though the few that are provided are keen and insightful. Ridley provides an enthusiastic audio commentary, in which he breathlessly rattles off facts, anecdotes, and analysis of the film at a lively clip. The disc also includes “Angels & Atom Bombs,” an informative and well-produced 40-minute making-of featurette that provides an engaging overview of the film’s production history and afterlife as a cult classic. Rounding things off are a few trailers for Film Movement Classics releases and a booklet that offers a note from Ridley on the restoration and an appreciative essay co-written by critic Travis Crawford and writer Heather Hyche.
Overall
Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin looks stunning on Film Movement’s Blu-ray, but it’s hard to overlook the dearth of special features.
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