Absolutely Fantastic

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The 2009 Australian film "In Her Skin" is based on a true story of a mentally unstable woman and her obsession with a neighbor girls perfect life. Its a story of two families dealing with heartbreak, class structures, self esteem and who is to blame.Guy Pearce and Miranda Otto play Mike and Elizabeth Barber the upper middle class parents of Rachel, a 15 year old Dancer, who goes missing after accepting a job from an estranged older friend named Caroline, played fearlessly by Ruth Bradley. The girls exist at opposite ends of the class and popularity spectrum. Rachel is young and beautiful with and equally beautiful boyfriend. She has two loving parents and a normal home life. While Caroline, who is in her early to mid 20s, lives alone in an apartment always on the brink of some kind of mental breakdown. Her parents are divorced and her father has long given up hope of having a "normal" daughter. He has had learn to just deal with her craziness after having to bail her out of situations her whole life. Caroline works a dull and dreary office job with little to no motivation to do anything more with her life. Rachel has been a sort of obsession and role model of hers every since she babysat for her years back. An idealized version of what she wish she could be. Caroline feels trapped and cursed to roam the earth in her overweight and unattractive body. She is unloved and unwanted. We can only watch as the clock ticks forward to an enviable breakdown. After Rachel doesn't return home one afternoon. Her parent start to worry and call her friends and the dance studio with no luck. They go to the police but are devastated to be told that Rachel must have ran away or is just out on a bender and will probably show up in a day or two. With all of the other more important cases, they can't be wasting their precious recourses on a missing teenage girl. Mike and Elizabeth do eventually find an investigator dedicated to finding what happen to Rachel and it all leads back to Caroline.The film is uniquely structured in that it is split up into three sections dealing with the individual characters view points and personal struggles. After a brief intro we start with a title card "Mike and Elizabeth", Then go on to "Caroline", then finally "Rachel". The resulting story is raw, honest, and heartbreaking. It is superbly acted by all involved and unlike most Hollywood studio movies doesn't offer any easy answers.

In Her Skin (2009)Rather compelling. And a knock out performance by one of the leads, the troubled young girl Caroline played by Ruth Bradley.This is a real life story of a murder of a girl in Australia (and the production is Aussie, so sometimes the accents a bit think for an outsider). It strives for basic realism, so the acting and photography and editing are fairly straight forward. And well done.Because of these very same things, the movie doesn't rise above. It depends on the story to make it special, and of course the story is sordid and scary, but it isn't actually so unusual in our murderous world. So things stay firmly rooted all along.What you might expect after awhile is some insight into the girls, and the families around them, since this is almost entirely what the movie is about. In a more obvious way, the theme also centers on beauty and the opposite of beauty. The two girls, Caroline the overweight angry kid and Rachel the successful dancer kid, are opposites in almost every way. The way society makes judgments, and the way girls see themselves through society's lens, are very much what (apparently) led to the eventual violence.Oddly enough, even though I like this, it isn't necessarily special enough to recommend. Maybe if the themes sound good, go for it. Or the idea of a simple, realistic glimpse of modern upper middle class Australia.

I would have rated this higher, but it's hard to watch because of the situation and the characters. It's a true story....if it was fiction, the situation and characters would be different and it would be a "better" movie. Earth is like that, often....VERY difficult!Caroline has a major problem(s). The only information I have to go on is the movie, and how the characters were portrayed in the movie. I don't have any information about Caroline or her family, specifically. Caroline's problem(s) could have been caused by an incident in her childhood, but, based on what I saw, that was not likely at all.This is what I don't like about the situation Caroline was in. A number of people knew she had a major problem(s), but they didn't know what to do about it, because of what we have been (wrongly) led to believe.Caroline's problem(s), in all likelihood, stem from a very traumatic experience that she had before she was born, in one of her previous lives. Her situation is similar to other people's, some of whom have been helped significantly by past-life regression therapy.Sometimes, there is nothing the parents, or anyone else can do to help a person within this life. If your loved one, or someone you know, has very serious problems, either physical or mental, which no one can find the answer to, I strongly recommend finding someone reputable and experienced who can try past life regression to see if that will help. If it doesn't help, that person will be no worse off.God wants us to try. Earth is VERY difficult, and all you have control over is how you try.God Bless Namastecliff DXB

I saw a movie today that moved me. I watched it by chance. I almost returned the movie to Netflix without watching. But, as luck would have it, I had nothing else to do, and nothing on my DVR, so I popped it in. I was in a trance the entire time. Simone North did something that is rarely done in movies today. She got a gut wrenching, honest and realistic performance. Ruth Bradley should have won an Oscar for her performance. The realistic portrayal of insanity was amazing. I was reading some reviews and was quite disappointed by their negative opinions of the movie. I am not sure what has happened to Hollywood. Why is it so one sided now? Why must everything in the movies be about portraying America as Bad and evil, the minority as the victim, the homosexual as the hero....I am okay with all of that IF THE MOVIE IS GOOD! Focus on the story, the acting....stop with the regurgitation of last years hits. Thank you Simone North for stepping out of the box and giving us some amazing performances.