Mysterious Skin Review

Gregg Araki is gay…and I’m not..however I will blow him for being the director with the coolest taste in music in the world. Sigur Rus, Ride, Suede…always using the best music for pretty mediocre to crappy films.

Mysterious Skin is his first good film. All his others are exercises in shock and awe..low budget Natural Born Killers. He does have a recognizable style though..must give him that. Any director that has a signature is noteworthy. So anyway, Mysterious Skin…good movie with very good acting. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is excellent and now I like him..he’s won me over. And the emotion of the film sinks in after a few days…I’ve been thinking about it for five days now.

Plot wise..I don’t want to give away much because the film actually does it too quickly anyway…I basically figured out the “mystery” in the first ten minutes…but just so I’m writing something about the film…it’s basically about the parallel stories of two boys growing up in a small town in Kansas in the 1980’s and early 90’s. That’s all you have to know going in to it.

This is a much more mature film than Araki’s other stuff and definitely worth the rental.