Philip Ridley's The Reflecting Skin, from 1990, is a handsome horror film that loses its impact as it reaches its denouement. Dick Pope's cinematography makes the rural 1940s setting glow like a fever dream, but Ridley's script is overdetermined and his direction overly static. The gothic bric-a-brac, whale jaws, rusted farm machinery and dilapidated farm buildings, overwhelms what little activity the characters engage in. After an intriguingly perverse opening, The Reflecting Skin bogs down in a romance that the viewer can foresee ending in doom.
This would not be fatal to this overly aesthetic genre film, if Ridley was able to draw some life from his players, but it was not to be. Not only are the juvenile actors deficient, but Ridley even elicits dull performances from such usually dependable actors as Lindsay Duncan and Viggo Mortensen. The Reflecting Skin ends up amounting to pretty shots of a worm wriggling on a hook.
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