Film Reviews

Mysterious Skin

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Brady Corbet
• Details: US / 99 mins (18s)

Sexually abused by their Little League baseball coach when they were eight years old, Brian (Corbet) and Neil (Gordon-Levitt) spend the next ten years coming to terms with their nightmare. The more sensitive Brian blanks the episode out and manages to convince himself he was abducted by aliens during the hours he cannot recall, while Neil becomes openly gay and revels in the seedy squalor of being a rent boy in a small American town. Based on a novel by Scott Heim, Gregg Araki's at times harrowing script offers two distinct narrative arcs in which the boys seek their very different consolations, and although he allows their paths to converge in a finale that offers a modicum of redemption to both characters, the titles of some of Araki's previous offerings - Totally Fucked Up, This is How the World Ends, The Doom Generation, Nowhere - should give some indication that a Hollywood ending isn't really on the cards. "We're not in Kansas anymore," Neil's friend warns when he arrives in New York, and the off-kilter Wizard of Oz reference suggests that Mysterious Skin is intended to be viewed as a contemporary retelling of a mediaeval fairytale, when Little Red Riding Hood, for example, was told in order to warn young girls about sexual predators. Compelling and disturbing in equal measures, with Corbet and Gordon-Levitt coping admirably with very difficult roles.

Review by Declan Burke