It ain’t easy being David Lynch. A master of surreal imagery and nightmare-fueled odysseys, the director has a particular method to his madness, blending narrative oddities and hellish scenarios with the simple ways of unassuming, small-townsfolk. He’s also known for sustaining a palpable mood in his productions, cultivating a dread-inducing atmosphere that is often imitated, never replicated by other filmmakers.
Enter Jennifer Reeder, who unleashes her second feature film, Knives and Skin (with her previous effort being 2017’s Signature Move). Taking several pages from Lynch’s playbook, namely his famous murder mystery series, Twin Peaks, Reeder (who also wrote the screenplay) sets out to craft her own stylish world, one heavily populated with strange occurrences and idiosyncratic personalities.
One part Twin Peaks, one part Ryan Gosling’s Lost River, and one part WB program, Knives and Skin strives to be something special, introducing a town rocked by the disappearance of a young woman. The reality is much more disappointing, as the film struggles to find its own identity, with Reeder using familiar elements to throw everything at the wall in the hope that something will stick. And at 111 minutes, this type of exercise slowly becomes interminable to watch.
Who Killed Carolyn Harper?
On a cold, quiet evening, high school choir student Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley) plans a sexual encounter with abusive jock Andy (Ty Olwin). After carving her initials into his forehead, she ultimately rejects his advances, with the bruised athlete turning the situation violent and leaving the girl stranded in the middle of nowhere without her glasses. After her daughter fails to return home, Lisa Harper (Marika Engelhardt) falls into a tailspin, her mind slowly eroding at the fear of having lost her only child. The next school day, the students are notified of Carolyn’s disappearance, putting the entire town on high alert as many dark secrets come to light.
A woman stalks her home with a kitchen knife. A late-night tryst turns bloody. A freshly cut wound and pair of eyeglasses impossibly glow in the dark. And a teenage girl goes missing. These are the images Reeder uses to introduce her world, plunging the viewer into an unnamed, hallucinatory Midwestern town where everyone has a secret and nobody is as they seem.
Granted, it’s impossible to watch Knives and Skin and not think about Twin Peaks for its entire duration. Carolyn Harper is a dead ringer for Laura Palmer, whose blonde, chaste visage and pearly-white smile seemingly held the entire town together. Her disappearance shakes up the foundation and is the catalyst for the story. Lisa Harper is your prototypical Sarah Palmer, the mother slowly losing her grasp on reality. And Andy is a pale imitation of Bobby Briggs, a sexist pig with utter contempt for the opposite sex (not helped by Olwin’s performance, who plays the role as irritatingly one-note as possible).
Overstuffed and Undercooked
After kicking off the film with startling urgency, the disappearance of Carolyn Harper is ignored for a large portion of the runtime, finding Reeder preferring to focus on the more unusual characters and their relationships with each other in this secluded town. There’s Joanna (Grace Smith), Andy’s sister and the Audrey Horne of this universe, who keeps up proper appearances but secretly sells used undergarments to perverted faculty members as a side hustle. There’s also Lynn, Andy and Joanna’s mother, who spends her days lying in bed with a tinfoil pillowcase and talking to the animals printed on her t-shirts. And then there’s Lynn’s husband, Dan (Tim Hopper), a recently laid off party clown who is currently having an affair with Renee (Kate Arrington), a pregnant waitress (drawing from another prominent piece of Twin Peaks iconography) and the wife to the town sheriff (James Vincent Meredith).
Trouble is, these aren’t exactly characters; they’re ciphers, established by Reederas a means of securing a narrative fingerprint in what already amounts to familiar territory. To counter this, the filmmaker established a bizarre musical element to Knives and Skin, with teenager Carolyn’s acapella class acting as a de facto Greek Chorus, derailing narrative momentum to cover hits by The Cure and Modern English. All of this culminates in a Magnolia-esque interlude wherein all characters, living and dead, sing the entirety of Naked Eyes’ “Promises Promises” to completion.
What’s most frustrating about Knives and Skin is despite all of these wild and weird ingredients, there is simply no connective tissue to keep everything together. Reeder’s vision is frustratingly opaque, preferring to keep the film running as an incessant checklist of quirks and peculiarities, content to move on to the next item after exhausting the previous one. The picture is literally bursting at the seams with ideas, but none congeal or pay off in a semi-satisfying manner.
Performances are generally all over the map, with the lone highlights being Engelhardt’s frazzled take on Grace Zabriskie, and Smith’s perfectly calibrated, sardonic teen rebel. No one else really makes quite an impression with what they’re given to work with.
Knives And Skin: Worth it?
There are some elements to admire in Knives and Skin, such as the twisted relationship that develops between Lisa and Andy after Carolyn’s disappearance. And the film is shot beautifully by Christopher Rejano, drenching the frame in a gorgeous tinge of neon lighting. But the film ultimately suffers from being an under-baked slice of surrealism set in Midwestern America, with Reeder serving up several influences and references culled from other, superior works, but failing to make anything her own.
What do you think? Does Knives and Skin sustain itself on surreal imagery?
Knives and Skin was released in limited theaters and on VOD in the US on December 6th, 2019.
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