Deborah Lipp

Mysterious Skin (2004) 9/10
Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Brian (Brady Corbet) couldn’t be more different. Neil is a tough, angry, gay hustler. Brian is a nerdy and kind of goofy young man obsessed with UFOs. But their shared history draws them together.

Mysterious Skin is a movie about child molestation, make no mistake. You may see it listed as a “gay” movie, because Neil is gay, but it is not about being gay any more than it is about UFOs. Mysterious Skin is about surviving the experience of child molestation, and what it does to the children, and to the adults they become. Neil and Brian react in ways absolutely opposite of each other, and yet in ways absolutely consistent with their experience. The writers certainly did their homework. In mannerisms, memories, and attitudes, these are definitely abuse survivors. Neil is hypersexual and disregards his own safety, by the time he is eleven or twelve he has abused another child. Brian is asexual, awkward, obedient, and lives at home; he blacks out and is plagued by dreams disconnected from his spotty memories. Each boy took the tools he had available to him in response to his trauma, and built a life as best he could.

I like that Neil was already gay, and was attracted (in his eight year-old way) to his abuser, and yet the film never suggests that the abuse is somehow “about” Neil being gay. It just gives Neil a different way of processing the experience. Neil was gay before and after, but after, his sexuality became something that could only be used to gain or lose power, to give or receive pain and threat.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is building a hell of a career. He is incredibly inward; everything happens behind his hooded eyelids, and yet he gives so much. Between this and Brick he has become an actor I want to see in everything he does.

Michelle Trachtenberg, on the other hand, lives to prove the mystery that, despite the many talented actors who can’t get work, the untalented and wooden still manage to do so. I just don’t get it.

Anyway, this is a very well-written, mostly well-acted, and kind of beautiful movie, but it is an extraordinarily painful one. It has a rape scene more brutal than anything I’ve ever seen, more disturbing, bloodier, and with Psycho earmarks all over it. I’m not ashamed to say I covered my eyes. So, not for the faint of heart, not a date movie, not a light evening of vegging out in front of the tube. But an excellent film.