The Reflecting Skin **** (1990, Viggo Mortensen, Lindsay Duncan, Jeremy Cooper) – Classic Movie Review 733

Writer-director Philip Ridley’s ultra-disturbing and dazzling 1990 art movie mixes horror, movie poetry and black humour to commanding effect.

Jeremy Cooper (aged 10) plays Seth Dove, a fantasising boy in rural America in the 1950s, whose father, Cameron Dove (Viggo Mortensen), tells him stories of vampires. This prompts him to think the weird widowed neighbour up the road, Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan), is a vampire and is killing his buddies.

But, unfortunately, there really are other much weirder people than the widow about: an abusive mother (Sheila Moore), a father charged with molestation, a brother (Duncan Fraser) he wants to save from the vampire and a band of youths roaming the region and creating havoc.

Set in America in the 1950s, but made in Alberta, Canada, this ravishingly filmed British gothic film delves horrifyingly into violence, death, sex and perversion, and should be treated with both caution and respect.

With Dick Pope’s eye-opening cinematography, this is a beautifully shot, astonishing-looking trip to the dark side. Surprisingly made as a BBC Film, along with support from British Screen, it is demonic and dangerous, head-banging stuff. It would certainly be a cult film, but it’s scarcely ever available and so rarely seen and hardly remembered from the 90s.

Mortensen worked again with Ridley on The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995). Cooper was also in The Gingerbread Man (1998) and Dangerous Crosswinds (2005).

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 733

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