The Reflecting Skin / Philip Ridley (1990)
The Reflecting Skin barely passes as horror. The film Ridley made is genuinely beautiful. Dick Pope's cinematography is extraordinary — wide prairie skies, golden wheat fields, the whole American mid-century rendered as a kind of poisoned pastoral. The production design rocks. Everything reads as either dead-on authentic or intentionally out of place, in a way that really grounds the characters but keeps viewers off-balance. Ridley famously had the wheat fields painted a more saturated yellow, and the artificiality is the point. This is not Idaho. This is a child's memory of Idaho, already mythologized beyond recognition. The great Viggo Mortensen is here!
So far, so good. The problem is what Ridley does with all of it. With no sound, this would be an incredibly beautiful drama. Maybe even precious. With sound, however ,the film is a prisoner of the choices made which were en vogue at the time. A score that at times, sweeps and at times stings seemingly innocuous events or hard cuts with shrill strings.
Child actors should be protected from harsh criticism, but they are the center of this film and as such the poor performance of the lead as Seth Dove is hard to ignore. To call this horror is a stretch, as the horror mostly takes place in the unseen imaginings of Seth. He comes to believe his neighbor is a vampire and invents a mythology around her that is barely shared with the viewer.
It's not just the child performers, but all the performances are off. Maybe that's a choice. Maybe that was the style of the late 1980s. David Longworth, as Joshua, a drunken and shaken father gives a performance worthy of an episode of Law & Order in the same era. Lindsay Duncan as Dolphin Blue (yes, there is a character called Dolphin Blue. Who lives in Idaho. In the 40's.) is good but uneven.
The film is weird, but never approaches the heights of weirdness or surreality achieved by David Lynch or David Cronenberg (or even Brandon). That may not be true, if you're only reading this and haven't seen the film. Does Seth discover an aborted fetus or perhaps stillborn baby AND keep it under his bed to whisper secrets to? Yes. This happens in the film, and isn't explained. Dolphin shows Seth a framed photo of her deceased husband, Adam, who looks suspiciously like Viggo Mortensen. This coincidence (or is it a plot point?) is never referenced. No character in the film seems to notice.
It's all so horrible you know, the nightmare of childhood. And it only gets worse. One day you'll wake up, and you'll be past it. Your beautiful skin will wrinkle and shrivel up, you'll lose your hair, your sight, your memory. Your blood will thicken, teeth turn yellow and loose. You will start to stink and fart and all your friends will be dead. You'll succumb to arthritis, angina, senile dementia, you'll piss yourself, shit yourself, drool at the mouth. Just pray that when this happens you've got someone to love you, because if you're loved you'll still be young.
It's possible that when the film was released this felt different than it does now. Watching for the first time in 2026, it's confusing but not intriguing. On a linear level, stripping away some of the incomplete threads and conceits of the story telling, there's an interesting core. The protagonist, worried about his brother, takes an opportunity to send the so-called vampire to her certain death. The interplay of themes of innocence, violence, nuclear anxiety of both the atomic age and the Cold War, the young mind, the adult mind has real potential, which Ridley never explores very deeply. Everything surrounding the themes themselves lacks fire and creates more questions.
Seth watches his best friend get kidnapped. When the police ask him, he doesn't tell them, even when Sheriff Ticker (Robert Koons; Unforgiven) nearly accuses him of involvement. Why? That's a weird choice that doesn't serve anyone in the narrative except the director of the film as he plods towards a "twist" ending.
Mortensen's Cameron is criminally underwritten. He returns from the war, and is apparently dying from radiation. He's Seth's idol and it's implied that he doesn't see himself as a hero or worthy of worship. But he's also kind of a dick for no reason. As soon as he sees Dolphin, his character changes from warm father figure to coldblooded stranger.
And the writing. The writing of dialogue, given this is written about the late 1940s in the late 1980s, sounds like the script was edited by an elementary school grammar teacher.
Finally, this is not a vampire film. It's a film where a boy thinks someone is a vampire. If Dolphin is a vampire, the entire film has a different meaning than what made it to the screen. That's the film I wish I'd have watched.
Key scene
Spoilers below
The frog, though. The opening scene — Seth and his friends, a frog, a casual cruelty committed in bright sunlight — remains as unsettling as anything in the film. In thirty seconds, before a word of thematic intention has been stated, Ridley communicates everything the next ninety minutes will labor to say. It's the best scene in the movie, and it might be the only truly frightening one. Shame it happens in the first five minutes and sets a bar the film never revisits.
Own it