Film

Mysterious Skin (2004)

Director: Gregg Araki

Movie review

From Time Out London

‘Make me happy, make me happy, make me happy.’ This crooning refrain, delivered by a lesion-covered john enraptured by the simple feel of another human’s skin, resonates across Gregg Araki’s masterful adaptation of Scott Heim’s novel. Gorgeous and harrowing, it marks a quantum leap for a director generally associated with flip, pop-coloured LA nihilism couched in an escapist milieu of murderous road-trips and high-school alien visitations. But Araki has always been concerned with the conflicting pursuits of love and identity – ideas that Heim’s story allows him to explore with a new directness but no less visual verve . Small-town Kansas eight-year-olds Neil and Brian have little in common: one is cocky and self-reliant, the other an introvert suffering from nose-bleeds and blackouts. Their connection remains oblique until a decade later, when Brian (Brady Corbet), convinced they were abducted by aliens, tries to track down Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) – now a charismatic hustler with plans to move to NYC but still shaped by his relationship with the boys’ paedophile Little League coach. In both the impressionistic childhood vignettes and the more intricately dove-tailed adolescent plot, Araki creates a powerfully intimate tone through first-person framing of conversations and lush, meticulous attention to pattern, colour and texture – fingers on a face, rain on a window, cereal on a floor. Also benefiting from Corbet and Gordon-Levitt’s very differently impressive performances, the result is subjective, unflinching and humane, often shocking but low on judgement and suffused with wondrous yearning. It’s a film full of characters gazing upwards in hope of a fantastical escape that cannot come.

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