Mysterious Skin (2004) on Netflix
In Hutchinson, Kansas, Neil McCormick and Brian Lackey are eight-year-old Little League teammates. Neil becomes a teenage hustler; Brian, missing five hours, believes aliens abducted him.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.6/1086,973 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes85%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Hutchinson, Kansas, in the summer of 1981, Neil McCormick and Brian Lackey are eight-year-old Little League teammates. Neil, raised by an irresponsible single mother, is already discovering his homosexuality when the team's coach sexually abuses him; he takes the man's attention for love and later seeks older men. Brian, whose parents are often absent, remembers rain during a game and then nothing until he woke in the crawl space beneath his home with a bloody nose, five hours unaccounted for. Nosebleeds and blackouts follow, and dreams of a bluish hand convince him aliens took him.
Cast
- Riley McGuireas Wendy (age 11)
- Rachael Nastassja Kraftas Deborah (age 12) (as Rachael Kraft)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Mysterious Skin (2004)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- To shield the child actors, the boys were given separate scripts including only the activities they would perform, with the characters' relationships explained in innocent terms; the seduction and abuse scenes were filmed with each actor performing alone, addressing the camera, then edited together.
- The US MPAA rated the film NC-17, the studio appealed unsuccessfully, and the film was released theatrically in the US without a rating at all.
- In a 2024 interview, Bill Sage, the actor who plays the sexually abusive coach, revealed that he went through child sexual abuse himself, which he said encouraged him to take on the role and "show how normal abusers can appear".
- In Australia the Australian Family Association requested a review of the film's classification, seeking to have it outlawed over its depiction of pedophilia, but the six-member Classification Review Board voted four-to-two in favour of maintaining an R18+ rating.
- Made on a low budget, filming commenced in August 2003 and lasted only three weeks, which gave the cast and crew no possibility of doing retakes.
- Gordon-Levitt was praised by critics for his performance and said people on the street had come up to applaud it; his portrayal of a teenage hustler inspired director Scott Frank to cast him in The Lookout.
- In 2025 it was one of the films voted for in the "Readers' Choice" edition of The New York Times' list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century", finishing at number 184.
