By Ben Bussey
Few things show up gaps in one’s own film knowledge more acutely than a movie you’ve never heard of dropping in your lap with a press release describing it as a ‘cult classic.’ It’s true, I was hitherto utterly unaware of writer-director Philip Ridley’s debut film, and indeed of Ridley himself and the intriguing, varied career he’s had as a writer and artist before and since. Perhaps, given my bias toward genre-based material, this ignorance needn’t be too unexpected, as The Reflecting Skin truly is one of those films which defies genre definition. Reading up on it now, I see that it is often described as a vampire movie, but this strikes me as extremely misrepresentative. Even so, it’s certainly true to say there’s more than a hint of horror movie about it, if only because of how harshly it exposes the dark side of the human condition – yet all set against a rural American landscape of often astonishing beauty, photographed in such a painterly manner as to overwhelm the audience. This juxtapostion of jaw-dropping aesthetic loveliness with displays of humanity at perhaps its ugliest combine to make The Reflecting Skin a viewing experience that is truly quite unique, and while it’s clearly not a film that everyone will appreciate, those who do are liable to completely flip their wig for it.
Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) is an eight year old boy, living in a remote, unspecified region of America in the 1950s, one of the youngest members of a small, strictly religious community amidst seemingly endless wheat fields. At a glance he’s the most harmless, sweet-natured boy you could imagine, although a jaw-dropping act of cruelty within the first five minutes leaves no doubt that he’s not as innocent as all that. Nor is his home as idyllic as it might initially appear, as he and his beleaugured father Luke (Duncan Fraser) suffer at the hands of domineering, often cruel matriarch Ruth (Sheila Moore) who seems unable to cope with the absence of their eldest son Cameron (Viggo Mortensen).
Worse yet, there seems to be a very real danger in the community when one of Seth’s friends abruptly vanishes, only to turn up dead on the Dove family’s property. This leads the somewhat tyrannical local sheriff’s department to suspect Luke Dove, owing largely to certain past indiscretions – but Seth suspects otherwise. He comes to believe the one responsible is Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan), the mysterious English widow who lives nearby – and what’s more, Seth thinks Dolphin is a vampire. However, when further tragedy results in Cameron returning home from his military service, there are soon stirrings of romance between Seth’s beloved elder brother and the vamp next door. What is a young, traumatised, almost-certain future sociopath to do?
As might be evident from that synopsis, the somewhat oblique choice of title and the distant, ethereal quality of the imagery included here, The Reflecting Skin is a somewhat unorthodox, self-consciously alienating piece of filmmaking with heavy arthouse leanings. Ridley himself describes it as a fairy tale, and although this isn’t the most immediately obvious parallel it does fit; there’s a heightened sense of unreality throughout, perhaps inevitable when it shows 1950s middle America from the perspective of a young Englishman in 1990 who’d never been to America before going to make that very film there. Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves seems a good point of comparison, and I have to suspect that Guillermo del Toro may have taken some inspiration from it on his own dark fairy tale movies, and yet The Reflecting Skin is very much its own beast.
It also doesn’t seem a million miles from Spielberg’s ET, given that it’s told almost exclusively from the perspective of a young boy, who naturally has only the vaguest grasp of what’s going on in the wider world around him. The Reflecting Skin, however, takes us to considerably darker places, unflinchingly presenting the mean-spirited, borderline savage behaviour of which the young are capable. None of this, however, is to imply that Seth is to be considered evil; he’s simply an under-stimulated child who has yet to learn right from wrong, or reality from imagination, hence his whole-hearted belief that Dolphin Blue is a vampire (which, although some reviews seem to suggest otherwise, the film never implies is actually the case).
All the poor boy really needs, it would seem, is a steady adult hand to offer him guidance. Herein lies his real problem, as there isn’t any such adult to be seen, and indeed most of them, notably his imbalanced parents and the brutally inhuman Sheriff (Robert Koons), seem many times more deluded and ignorant than Seth himself. The role of Christianity is not emphasised too heavily – there are no church scenes, no Bible readings, none of that obsessive Carrie’s mother stuff – yet it is made clear that this very small community takes certain Christian schools of thought very seriously indeed, particularly when it comes to the subject of sin, and this mindset informs several of the film’s most harrowing moments. Furthermore, it underlines how this literalist interpretation of religion has predisposed Seth to wholeheartedly believe what he is told – whilst, at the same time, being too young to fully process the truth of what he sees before him.
The only real sparks of love and kindness come from Duncan’s Dolphin, and Mortensen’s Cameron – yet they too are dealing with significant traumas of their own. While I do find her chosen character name a bit much, Dolphin is a magnificent character brought to life beautifully by Lindsay Duncan, whose hauntingly soft voice really brings out the underlying poetic quality of Ridley’s dialogue. While being widowed from suicide has clearly left her an extremely damaged human being – one who says things to Seth that one should never, ever say to an eight year old (resulting in many of the most darkly funny moments) – she is the one person who at least seems to make some effort to really connect with Seth on an emotional level. Mortensen’s big brother, meanwhile, is clearly well-meaning but also fighting some significant demons of his own from his work, which we come to ascertain is connected with military atomic testing; his description of children turned silver as a result of nuclear radiation would seem to be the source of the film’s title.
So just to surmise, we have A-bomb angst, suicide widowhood, fundamentalist Christian paranoia, childhood sociopathic tendencies and the suspicion of vampirism – and I haven’t even touched on paedophilia, and the thing which Seth assumes to be a fallen angel. Yes, there is a hell of a lot going on in The Reflecting Skin, and very little of it is resolved in a neat way by the somewhat sudden end, so if you prefer your films driven by coherent narrative then The Reflecting Skin almost certainly isn’t for you. However, there’s no denying that it is a film of often quite staggering visual and emotional power. The extras on the Blu-ray see Ridley and cinematographer Dick Pope discuss at length the artistic influence and perfectionism that went into the look of the film, and this definitely results in a striking film loaded – or possibly overloaded – with symbolism. It may get a bit much, and it most definitely will come off as far too ostentatious for some tastes, yet it also really stays with you. Again, there’s no doubt that many viewers will be entirely put off by the film’s alienating nature, but it’s easy to see how this is a film which might obsess some viewers, with every scene if not every frame crying out to be analysed.
Should you be so inclined as to fall under The Reflecting Skin’s spell, then this Blu-ray from Soda Pictures is without doubt the copy to do it. I’m not the biggest Blu-ray fan in the world, generally finding the sound and picture upgrade from DVD to be pretty negligible, but it is emphasised in the extras that the 2K remaster on this new edition is the best the film has looked since its release. The disc also works well as a Philip Ridley primer (as, indeed, it was for me), giving a fair overview of his broad career, from artist to playwright to musician to children’s author: on which road, filmmaker would only seem to have been a minor detour, Ridley having only directed two more movies in 1995’s The Passion of Darkly Noon and 2010’s Heartless. Seems to have been a recurring problem for visionary young directors coming out of Britain around the turn of the 1990s, to rise quickly but burn out even quicker: see also Clive Barker and Richard Stanley. Still, there’s something to be said for passing up a long, prolific career in favour of producing a smaller body of work of genuine power and individuality, and Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin seems as good an example of this is any other.
The Reflecting Skin is available on limited edition (2000 copies) Steel Book Blu-ray on 30th November, from Soda Pictures. Pre-order here.