Mysterious Skin

Neil and Brian, two boys from the same small Kansas town, were abused by their Little League coach one summer as children. Years later Neil is a reckless teenage hustler drawn to older men, while Brian, who has no memory of the abuse, is convinced he was taken by aliens and pieces together fragments of that lost time. Their paths finally converge on the truth they carry between them.

The film shows two opposite ways of metabolising the same abuse, one through repetition and one through a screen memory that hides the event behind a fantasy of abduction. For a clinician it is a striking depiction of dissociation, memory, and the varied afterlife of childhood trauma. It screened In Competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2004 and is based on the novel Mysterious Skin by Scott Heim.