The Reflecting Skin is an incredibly different kind of vampire movie. It has the sensibilities of a David Lynch movie and the visual aesthetic of Andrew Wyeth. There’s hand painted fields of golden wheat, dust covered gravel roads, and barns that are tilted askew. It is a weird movie, it is a dark movie, and it is an unpleasant movie that explores the nightmares of middle rural America through the eyes of a 9 year old child.
The movie starts out with three little kids blowing air into a frog and exploding it in the face of the local weird British lady. Soon the children suspect that the odd young lady is a vampire. She doesn’t like to look into mirrors, she tells the children that she’s 200 years old, and she keeps her dead husband’s hair and teeth in a box. Soon the children of the town start getting murdered, and young Seth Dove tries to understand and piece together what darkness covers this town.
The movie shares a lot of similarities with David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, especially its senes of hyperrealism. There’s a lot of weirdness in the movie. A lot of it, especially early on, as we have a father that stinks of gasoline, a mother that is overly neurotic, and a mysterious slick black car with leather clad men that look like Elvis and James Dean. But there’s also some things that weird just for the sake of being weird. There’s a set of twins that carry a dead chicken down the road, Seth finds an aborted fetus that he thinks is an angel, and there’s a scene where Seth’s mother forces him to drink an ungodly amount of water as a punishment.
The fetus, I found to be particularly disturbing. The deaths of the children are disturbing. Everything in the movie is disturbing. It paints a desolate world that has no hope. And having such a nightmarish pessimistic view point, leads to a sad and unfulfilling ending.
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