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Mysterious Skin is a 2004 Dutch-American drama film directed by American filmmaker Gregg Araki, who also wrote the screenplay based on Scott Heim's 1995 novel of the same name. The film is Araki's eighth, premiering at the 61st Venice International Film Festival in 2004, although it was not more widely distributed until 2005.
Mysterious Skin tells the story of two pre-adolescent boys who are sexually abused by their baseball coach, and how it affects their lives in different ways into their young adulthood. One boy becomes a reckless, sexually adventurous male prostitute, while the other retreats into a reclusive fantasy of alien abduction.
During the summer of 1981 in Hutchinson, Kansas, eight-year-olds Neil McCormick and Brian Lackey, teammates in Little League, both experience life-altering events. Neil, the son of an irresponsible single mother and already discovering his homosexuality, is sexually abused by his Little League coach, who leaves town after that summer. Brian, with a neglectful father and a mother who's often working, remembers it starting to rain during a game. The next thing he remembers is being in a crawl space in his house with a bloody nose, having no memory of the intervening five hours.
Neil views the coach's abuse as love and becomes mainly attracted to "bearish" middle-aged men. He begins prostituting himself at the age of 15. Three years later, he moves to New York City, where his best friend Wendy Peterson now lives, and continues prostituting there. Neil has an emotional encounter with a "customer" dying from AIDS. Though Neil suspects the man wants sex, he actually wants nothing more than to feel another person's touch. The encounter leads Neil to start to withdraw from prostitution and take a job as a cashier.
For years after coming to in the crawl space, Brian suffers from chronic nosebleeds, blackouts and bedwetting. He has unsettling recurring dreams about being touched by a strange, bluish hand. These odd dreams lead Brian to suspect that he may have been abducted by aliens. Eventually, another boy wearing the same Little League uniform begins to appear with him in these dreams. When he's 18, Brian meets a woman named Avalyn Friesen who also believes she was abducted by aliens. They begin to form a friendship, but when she comes onto him, he panics and refuses to speak to her again.
While trying to untangle his confused memories, Brian sees a photo of his Little League team, recognizing a young Neil as the boy from his dreams. Taking the initiative to meet his former teammate, Brian instead meets Neil's mother and his friend Eric Pressly, and through him, he learns more about Neil. After being beaten and raped by a trick, Neil returns to Hutchinson to spend Christmas with his mother. Then, Neil and Brian meet for the first time in over a decade. After breaking into the house that was previously rented by the baseball coach, Neil tells Brian what happened that night: after the baseball game was rained out and Brian didn't have a ride home, the coach offered to drive Brian home with Neil. Instead, they all went to the coach's house, where the coach performed sex acts on the boys and made them perform sex acts on each other. A porch light caused the atmosphere to have an eerie blue color. After the coach and Neil put Brian's clothes back on, Brian collapsed face-first onto the floor, causing the bloody nose. Learning the truth at last, Brian breaks down crying and is comforted by Neil as Christmas carolers sing "Silent Night".
| Mysterious Skin | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Gregg Araki |
| Produced by | Gregg Araki |
| Screenplay by | Gregg Araki |
| Based on | Mysterious Skin by Scott Heim |
| Starring | Joseph Gordon-Levitt Brady Corbet Michelle Trachtenberg Mary Lynn Rajskub Elisabeth Shue |
| Music by | Harold Budd Robin Guthrie |
| Cinematography | Steve Gainer |
| Edited by | Gregg Araki |
| Distributed by | Tartan Films |
Release date
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Running time
| 105 minutes[1] |
| Country | United States Netherlands |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $2.1 million[2] |
