Mysterious Skin

This thoughtful, troubling drama is leagues above the sensationalistic stuff Araki peddled in earlier films.

Invigorating, blistering and chilling.

A helter-skelter ride of the soul, an unblinking, white-knuckle crash landing into the mushy mysteries of the subconscious.

A deft, affecting drama about childhood sexual abuse and its lifelong scars.

Mysterious Skin isn't a picture about existential vacancy; it isn't even about anything so simplistic as the horrors of child abuse. It's more of a meditation on the necessity of making your way past, or through, any obstacle that prevents you from being a thinking, feeling person.

A well-conceived story that is very hard to shake.

Had Araki chosen to illuminate, rather than exploit, the traumatic aftermath of child molestation, his wallow in the horrors of Mysterious Skin might have had a purpose. As it stands, his film is just another trashy look at America as the land of imbecilic perverts.

Mysterious Skin is gut wrenching story, tragedy with great acting from Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet. Mysterious Skin is a movie that stays with you, it's impossible to shake off.

Una reflexión sublime, un retrato muy real y humano de las repercusiones en la psique de quienes sufrimos de abuso infantil, de una manera u otra. De la variabilidad de resultados frente a un trauma como este.

Sad, odd and viscerally beautiful film about the act itself and the aftermath of child molestation. A film about how profoundly such experience can affect the free will, the choices the victims make later in their life and ultimately the constitution of their personality. Is there a lesson to be learned here? With all the uncompromising depiction and dialogue all over the place, i really doubt that. All that you are left with is the wish that you yourself were able to change the past of these poor souls. Trust me, that implausible and irrational wish will linger on you for days just like some mysterious skin.

Shocking, simply shocking! Granted any intelligent viewer would have anticipated the denouement long before it was revealed, still through the masterful work of the director you are held spellbound! wow!

A Heartbreaking Exploration of Enduring Trauma and the Lasting Scars of Youth.181225 (4.0)An enduring violence that leaves a lonely child even sadder, and a terrified child even more anxious. Directed by Gregg Araki and based on Scott Heim's 1995 novel, the 2004 drama "Mysterious Skin" stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet as two boys growing up in Kansas whose lives are irrevocably altered by childhood sexual abuse. While one copes by descending into a reckless life of street hustling and emotional detachment, the other represses his trauma through vivid alien abduction fantasies, eventually bringing the two together as young adults to confront the harrowing reality of their shared past.