Mysterious Skin

Indie director Gregg Araki (The Doom Generation, Totally F***ed Up) comes of age with his stylish and deeply moving adaptation of Scott Heim's novel about child abuse.

Echoing many of the themes from Araki's earlier work, Mysterious Skin is a haunting and poetic anthem to doomed youth.

The film opens with 18 year-old Brian Lackey (Corbet) recalling, in voiceover, the day that changed the rest of his life.

"The summer I was eight years-old, five hours disappeared from my life," he confides. "Last thing I remember was sitting on the bench at my little league game"

The next thing Brian remembers is waking up in the crawl space beneath his house, with blood pouring from his nose but no recollection of the events of that afternoon.

Brian becomes convinced that he is an alien abductee. But as fractured memories of the past begin to resurface, Brian recalls the face of a boy from his past - a boy who may also have been abducted that day.

So Brian heads for hustle and bustle of New York City to track down his childhood friend Neil McCormick (Gordon-Levitt), now a gay hustler who ignores the warnings of his friends Wendy (Trachtenberg) and Eric (Licon) to pick up strangers in bars and parks.

When Brian arrives, Neil is forced to recall his own deeply troubled childhood. He knows only too well what happened that fateful day: A date with their little league baseball coach

Mysterious Skin is a tour-de-force of direction and blistering performances. Araki's adaptation relates events from the perspective of the two young men, cleverly employing a subjective point-of-view to convey the darker elements of the story.

What the eye can't see is often more horrifying than anything the director could commit to celluloid.

Showing at The Duke of York's Picturehouse from today