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Mysterious Skin (2004)

Director: Gregg Araki

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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.

Author: BW 2005-05-16 12:31:34

Time Out London Issue 1813: May 18-25 2005

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User reviews of this film

Jackie L. Vester said...

Posted on Nov 01 2007 12:49 My sister who is a school teacher begged me to get this film. I had many problem's finding it but I finally tracked it down. I'm so glad that I did. This is probably one of the best most beautifully done film's I have ever seen. The acting was top notch on every level. I was shocked to find out that Brady Corbet who played the older Brian was only 15 years old at the time that he filmed this. I sat there in wonder trying to understand where this child got the pain that he showed on the screen. I cried like a little girl at the ending where Neal told Brian the awful truth of what happened to him at the hand's of his coach. I strongly reccomend anyone to get this fim anyway you can. After renting it I went to ebay and bought. It was probably the best most well spent $20.00 I have ever spent. If you have children and even if you don't, Please watch this movie.

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