Knives and Skin

“Feels like one of the more empowering feminist declarations in years. It may be the most anarchic and refreshing take on the American teen’s existential malaise since HEATHERS.”

Demetrios Matheou, SCREEN

“Speaks with a boldly original auteur voice, and has plenty to say”

Stephen Dalton, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

“Captivating in its oddness, ambition, and emotional resonance”

Kristy Puchko, RIOT MATERIAL

“I actually don’t want to see what’s about to happen.” Something strange is happening in the quiet midwestern town of Middle River. Tonight, high school student Carolyn Harper will go out to a lake with her boyfriend and find herself abandoned there. Soon afterwards, she will vanish off the face of the earth. Tomorrow, and in the days that follow, her circle of friends, their high school classmates, parents and neighbours, will develop a myriad of unusual coping mechanisms as they attempt to navigate their grief and neuroses, their bonds tested by waves of distrust and anxiety. Sound heavy? It is. It’s also one of the most exhilaratingly enjoyable and dreamy experiences you’ll have in a cinema this year.

A work of unbridled creativity with trace elements of Lynch, high school dramedies, and Giallo cinema woven into a wholly singular, personal fabric, KNIVES AND SKIN is a surreal journey into smalltown girlhood that will stay with you for lifetimes. Described by its gifted maker as a feminist teen Noir, it’s a neon-saturated phantasmagoria about navigating the developing internal, the search for exits and the struggles for agency that on a larger level explores the forces of communal trauma with invention and wit — and hair-tingling reworkings of ‘80s pop songs. Writer-director Jennifer Reeder proposes girlhood as a place of transcendence and transgression, and views coming-of-age as a lifelong process, a perspective that informs her film in the most brilliant ways as it speaks to adulthood disappointments as penetratingly as it does to teenage angst. A visually dazzling miracle of cinematic storytelling that’s poignant and playful, tragic and hilarious, with a style that’s both theatrical and raw, populated by atypical teen characters you will adore, KNIVES AND SKIN is something so uncanny and beautiful that it warrants outright celebration. Nobody else could have made this film. – Mitch Davis