The Reflecting Skin
Eight year-old Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) lives in an isolated American prairie community in the 1950s. The film opens with Seth and his friends Eben and Kim, playing with a frog Seth has found in the fields. The boys inflate the frog by inserting a reed up its anus and leave it by the side of the road. When a local English widow, Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan) stops to inspect it, Seth shoots the inflated frog with a slingshot, causing it to explode over Dolphin.
Seth retreats back to the small gas station where he lives with his harridan mother Ruth (Sheila Moore) and shy father Luke (Duncan Fraser). Seth’s older brother, Cameron (Viggo Mortensen), is away on military service in the Pacific (Ruth refers to them as "the pretty islands"). Seth serves gas to a mysterious group of young men driving a black Cadillac, who promise to see him again soon and drive off.
Seth is sent to Dolphin’s house to apologise for the frog prank. Dolphin is haunted by the memory of her dead husband, who hung himself for unknown reasons a week after their wedding. Surrounded by artifacts from her husband’s family’s whaling past, Seth takes some of her self-pitying remarks (she claims to be "two hundred years old") literally, and after learning about vampires from his father, who is reading a novel on that theme, Seth surmises that Dolphin must be a vampire.
After Eben goes missing, Seth and Kim go to Dolphin’s house to investigate, because Seth believes she is responsible for Eben's disappearance. The boys excitedly demolish Dolphin’s bedroom belongings, and run from the house screaming after spying on her masturbating. Seth runs home, and later finds Eben’s dead body floating in the water cistern. The local authorities believe Luke is responsible, because of a homosexual indiscretion years previously; believing himself to be doomed, Luke douses himself with petrol and incinerates himself.
Cameron returns home to look after Seth, as Ruth has become shell-shocked following Luke’s death. Whilst visiting his grave, Cameron meets Dolphin, and romance sparks between the two, much to Seth’s horror. In a nearby barn, Seth and Kim discover an ossified dead fetus, which Seth believes to be Eben incarnate as a fallen angel and takes home with him. The next day, Seth follows Cameron to Dolphin’s house, where he observes Cameron emotionally confessing to Dolphin his culpability in atomic bomb experiments. Cameron and Dolphin begin to make love; running in terror from the house, Seth witnesses the men in the Cadillac abducting Kim.
Cameron’s body begins to deteriorate from radiation sickness, which Seth attributes to Dolphin's supposed vampirism. Kim’s body is discovered the next day, and law enforcement authorities still believe that Luke is alive and responsible. As Cameron and Dolphin grow closer and plot to run away together, Seth focuses his rage at Dolphin, and after consulting with the fetus "angel", orchestrates Dolphin being led away by the men in the black Cadillac. The next morning, Dolphin’s body is found, and Cameron breaks down into tears. Realising the reality of what he has done, Seth runs to a nearby field and, overwhelmed with guilt and grief, screams at the setting sun.
cult, psychedelic, murder