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Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

It's not uncommon to see films about childhood that show life prom their point of view and incorporate an element of fantasy in the process, but it's rare that the vision be this bleak and the fantasy so dark. Little Seth has a lot to deal with ... his friends are disappearing and turning up murdered. His father is suspected due to a past homosexual indiscretion. His mother is a crazy person obsessed with the smell of gasoline and the return of his elder brother (Viggo Mortensen) from WWII. His neighbor, a very depressed widow, is a vampire ... and she's probably killing his brother. His dead friend returns as some sort of rotting fetal angel. Friendly leather boys roam the plains in a shiny car.Dick Pope's cinematography is beautiful. Fans of David Lynch want to see this, yet it has it's own very unique tone.

What unadulterated, self-indulgent crap! The acting was simply awful! :( Boy, I wish I could get those precious hours back! I guess the one consolation is that I watched it on Encore Avenue and didn't waste any money renting it.I would like to leave the review at that, but I must write at least ten lines, so here goes.It is a good thing for Viggo Mortensen that he has done some fantastic work since then, or he might have gone the way of Philip Michael Thomas.I generally don't watch movies that show fewer than three stars in the description on my digital guide; this one had no stars, but I simply thought that an oversight. Next time, I'll know what an absence af stars means.

"The Reflecting Skin" is among the most beautiful and elegiac movies I have ever seen.It's dark and depressing film which takes place during 50's.Philip Ridley's full-length debut features many memorable moments for example frog exploding in a torrent of blood and guts,a couple of chirping ladies walking close to Seth and carrying a dead seagull,a gruesome suicide that ended with a burning gas station and the discovery of the mummified baby in the barn.The water plays the major theme in "The Reflecting Skin".The film is extremely poetic with its bleak subject matter of loneliness and mourn.The cinematography of Dick Pope is breathtaking with some moody shots of the fields,rolling hills and big skies.Dreamy and strangely hypnotic "The Reflecting Skin" is an unforgettable trip into sadness and melancholy.9 out of 10.

As a psychologist who has worked with child abuse victims and their families for over 30 years, and as a survivor of horrific child abuse myself, I would say that The Reflecting Skin is the most psychologically accurate depiction of child abuse that I've ever seen. And certainly the most uncompromising in terms of not romanticizing the victim. In The Reflecting Skin--SPOILER ALERT--the central victim is an 8-year-old farm boy, who is traumatized at one time or another by nearly everyone in his life. His mother, Ruth, rejects him and punishes him with water poisoning. His father, Luke, commits suicide in front of him. A depressed young widow, Dolphin Blue, terrorizes him with details of her husband's suicide and remnants of his corpse she has saved in a cigar box. Even his beloved older brother, Cameron, who himself is a victim of both his mother's incestuous advances and the US military's atomic testing program in the Pacific, is sometimes physically and emotionally abusive towards him—at one point showing him the photo of a Hiroshima baby with "reflecting skin," from which the film takes its names. But unlike the usual tearjerker Hollywood movie about child abuse, Seth is no more an "innocent angel" than is his brother or his father or his friends who get murdered. At the point we meet Seth running through a Van Gogh-colored field with a huge toad in his hands, he is already turning into the next generation of abuser—happily blowing up that toad with air the same way his mother blows him up with water. And he manages to retaliate against one of the adult abusers in his environment, Dolphin Blue, in the process. But he doesn't mean to kill her. Yet that is where his silence about the gang of serial killers he sees roaming the country roads in a black Caddy finally leads. That is the realization that finally shatters him. But what alternative to silence does he have? The best chance he has of stopping the killers is when Sheriff Ticker tries to force him into spilling his secrets. Yet the sheriff is so verbally abusive to Seth—even to the point of threatening to split Seth's head open to get the truth out of him—that Seth freezes and says nothing. Like most abused kids Seth believes that he's entirely on his own. And to judge from all the negative reviews of this film he has reason to feel that no one will understand him and know how to help him. Because of all the abuse he's already internalized at the point the film begins, he is no more lovable as a victim than the mummified fetus he tries to make his friend.