Mysterious Skin

Mysterious Skin is a film about changes. About those devastating instances in one's life that send you spiralling on a trajectory you could never have expected, and the shattering consequences that spread outwards like ripples in a pond.

Two children, united by a mysterious secret, grow up in wildly divergent ways – one (Corbett) a timid sci-fi geek who believes the past he cannot remember is the fault of alien kidnappers, the other (Gordon-Levitt) a self-destructive rent boy desperate to escape his dead-end town. But of course the past that haunts them both brings them crashing together as the search for the truth brings to light a very unpleasant chain of events that has shaped the people they have become.

But it's not only the characters that have been changed – it's director Gregg Araki whose staggering metamorphosis makes Mysterious Skin one of the most interesting and important films of 2005. One of the pioneering New Queer filmmakers, Araki's nihilistic early output forwarded the notion that nothing really mattered, that sex, horror and death were part of an endless human cycle, that there was no real love, no real hope, and no real point.

Mysterious Skin rejects this cynical hypothesis – everything that happens in this film matters, every revelation stings like a wasp attack, every decision has its inevitable repercussions on those around. In fact, the final moments of revelation stand as amongst the most moving, nay shattering, minutes of celluloid in recent American film history. This film hurts, and with the themes it's dealing with it damn well should.

As a word of warning, it should be stated that this is not a film for those who like their character dramas sugar-coated – child abuse, rape, assault, alcoholism and AIDS all bubble to the surface in this portrait of the underbelly of a country that has somehow lost its way. For those who are willing to walk on the dark side, Mysterious Skin will certainly leave its mark on you. In fact, it may change you.

Greg Taylor