I remember being very impressed by Philip Ridley's first feature film The Reflecting Skin back in the early nineties. And I wasn't the only one. The film was being shown at cinema clubs all over again and everyone loved it.
But then it vanished. There has been no proper DVD publication, and at least the Finnish VHS publication is pretty scarce. In Finnish television it's been shown twice, last in 1998. So it was no wonder there was quite a lot of people at the Film Archive screening of the film last Monday.
The film is still hauntingly beautiful, terrifyingly funny, tragically sad, absurdly real, full of grief, fear and laughter. It's a morbid film, but it's still full of warmth towards the people in it. Lots of these weird genre hybrids are devoid of feelings, but The Reflecting Skin is about real people and their real feelings, even though they are all pretty sick and weird. There was one young dude in the audience saying the film seems more like a curiosity, something no one's ever heard of, but then again he was two when the film came out. I'd like to ask him what he thought of the film after he'd seen it.
More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog.
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