Philip Ridley has watched too many David Lynch pictures. He seems to have a knack for the grotesque and macabre, but he is missing an essential something that Lynch usually hits on the head. Both filmmakers have relatively ordinary people confronted with extraordinary situations. The difference is that Lynch's characters behave in more or less predictable, human ways when trying to find their way out of the mess. In The Reflecting Skin, nobody behaves like a normal person would, and the viewer is left as a patron at a freak show.

Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) lives in a surreal 1950s prairie community. His mom is nuts, his dad is most likely a repressed homosexual who reads too many vampire novels, and he and his friends torment the local eccentric with exploding frogs. That is, until his friends start turning up dead. The police, who know about his father's dalliances, suspect the odd but harmless man, and he commits suicide by gas pump. When bodies still turn up, the police and locals still suspect the father, even though he is dead and buried. For some reason, nobody connects the long black car filled with sinister teenage boys with the disappearances. Even Seth, who watched them kidnap one of his friends, inexplicably blames the eccentric neighbor lady, Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan), thinking she's a vampire who wants the blood of his recently returned brother Cameron (Viggo Mortensen), who is obviously dying of radiation sickness.

The one thing I must say is that the film is visually stunning. The empty vistas of the prairie were inspired by the painter Andrew Wyeth (famous for "Christina's World"). (Don't think I knew that without help—I had seen the painting, but Google had to fill in the artist and title).