Reflecting Skin (1990)

Y'all ever have that friend in high school you think "that kid has it all together," then you go over to their house and find out they are just as weird as anyone else? I don't mean internet meme worthy, just maybe they roll their toilet paper the other way or their dad has a "no pants in the house" rule. Spending time with people tends to bring out all those little eccentricities, but in the case of Reflecting Skin it brings out all the dark, weird shit swirling beneath.

     In a small community that consists mainly of wheat fields and houses painted decades before, young Seth (Cooper) lives with his Pa and Ma at their gas station. His brother Cameron (Mortensen) has been off in the military, and things have not so much gone down hill as slid comfortably into crazy town. Seth's innocence or lack thereof is threatened by his belief the nearby widow is a vampire and the fact that serial killers roam the roads.

     Let's take out the metaphors for a moment and look at this story. Seth is a young boy with all the borderline sociopathic tendencies that entails, including blowing up a bullfrog in a woman's face and mocking a friend for crying about his dead mother. His mother is pining after the brother that left and his father devours pulp stories and stares out into the wheat all haunted like. The boredom this neglected kid feels manifests itself into taking those pulp stories and turning them on the neighboring widow, breaking into her house and tearing all her shit up. Before this blog becomes an advocate for local youth programs, the slow burn that unleashes the trauma may have continued until Seth began drawing what the inside of the bullfrogs look like for "experiements" if not for the serial killers roaming the land.

     While the real menace of the movie is the underlying trauma everyone has, the sporadic and horrific deaths drive people to act. Pa sits secretly gay and beaten down by the life he was forced to choose with Ma until a boy dies and the local deputy brings up that time Pa was found kissing a boy (who was 17) in the barn. That causes Pa to act out pretty horribly, drinking a bunch of gas and spreading the love aka burning down himself and the gas station. This causes Cameron to come home, his body deteriorating from the war in the pacific and nuclear fallout, and he finds solace in the arms of the widow, only to have more tragedy heaped after a brief scene of tenderness. Seth watches all this, seeing the deterioration but not comprehending due to his age, while ignoring the real threat of the killers. Hell, he delights in the fire and sees the tenderness as a vampire feeding. Kid does less coming of age and more compiling of trauma.

     It's a stark movie, placid almost in the wide sweeping shots of wheat fields. The starkness of the visuals plays with the movie's themes. Look at all that quiet peace, the movie says, while a pack of wolves in a black car glides along. 

     If you are in a particular mood, check it out.