The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Astonishing … Mysterious Skin is a complex and challenging emotional experience.”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Cinematic treatments of trauma—usually within families, and often accessed by invoking the supernatural—have never been more commonplace. Yet no film has eclipsed the horrific and sensitive Mysterious Skin, a narrative unlike any other in Gregg Araki’s filmography. Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Brian (Brady Corbet), and Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg) meet in Kansas as kids in the ​’80s. They all leave, escaping to New York for adult experience or into alien-abduction narratives for innocence. Neil and Brian in particular are linked on a psychic level. Araki, in confrontational close-ups, returns to scenes of the boys’ sexual abuse from a trusted coach, seen according to Neil’s retrospective narration. Araki’s editing, in practical terms, safeguards the younger cast from graphic images, but makes explicit to the audience how the rehearsal of memory and the restaging of suffering is an uneven, vivid loop that consumes and elongates time. The score is by Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie.

Advisory: Mysterious Skin contains scenes of sexual violence.

“The [film’s] opening image is beguiling and terrifying in almost equal measure … Mysterious Skin is warped, beautiful, and strangely hopeful … It seems all of a piece with Araki’s existentialism, his grasp of genuine suffering, and his sense of fun that redeems what would otherwise be insupportably dark material.”

Ella Taylor, LA Weekly

“Mysterious Skin suggests a reverie with multiple awakenings … Fittingly, the ending, which crescendos to a dizzying moment of mutual reckoning, offers catharsis but not escape.”

Dennis Lim, Village Voice