Myterious Skin is a movie that is perfect in that it captures you in its storytelling and in the end drops its message on you in a very subtle way. Honestly if you don't have a tear in your eye in this powerful ending with its unbelievably intense music by Sigur Ros you must be dead inside. The movie revolts of the growing up of two kids, Neil and Brian, whom we follow from their childhood to their 19th years. Both play in the same baseball team as kids but don't meet again until the end of the film. Neil gets into sexual play with his baseball trainer and turns a gay hustler while Brian sees UFOs and tries to find out about the moments his mind blacked out.. of course thinking of an alien abduction. The movie basically deals with Brian trying to unfold the mystery of his blanked out memory and meeting a strange UFO-Girl with similar experiences while Neil is growing up into more and more sexual obsessed gay life.

The way the story is told is just interesting, the acting is incredibly believable from all involved but most of all by Joseph-Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet as the grown up Neil and Brian. The movie has a strange calmness with some beautiful scenes ... except for one particular scene (and having seen Irreversible this is tame) I don't understand what people find shocking about Mysterious skin. The whole way of Neil growing up doesn't seem dramatic... its just the small things hidden behind his acting (like his best friend says he has a black hole where others have a heart) and his distant stare when being hugged. His realization falls close to that of Brian and the way they deal with their past seems so real one can relate to it.

I never found myself being so touched by the subject of child abuse especially because of the calmness and the final lines Neil delivers with Brian on his lap and fading into the beautiful piano melody of Sigur Ros' Samskeyti. Mysterious Skin doesn't hammer its message into the viewers head but rather makes him think about the fact that a small moment in the early years can change a life forever and nothing can be undone again. This is a wonderful movie that leads straight into a finale with falling curtains and standing ovations ... finally after so many movies who let you down in the end. All thumbs up!