Marching Band Member Goes Missing in Jennifer Reeder's Musical Teen Noir Knives and Skin

The marching band member who goes missing

KNIVES AND SKIN 
(Jennifer Reeder, USA, 2019, 111 minutes)

I love a good musical teen noir, and Jennifer Reeder's Knives and Skin is a…not-bad musical teen noir. Her followup to 2017's Signature Move begins with a knife-wielding mother wondering where her 15-year-old daughter has gone. Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley), a drum major, has gone to a secluded riverbank to get busy with Andy (Ty Olwin), a varsity football player. Andy has a girlfriend, but these two have made out before. At the last minute, Carolyn decides she isn't feeling it, so Andy pushes her away and drives off with her hat and glasses--but not before she scratches him on the forehead.

The next day, Carolyn's band mates wonder where's she's gone. The last we saw of her, she was very much alive, but bleeding, while Andy still has a "C" mark on his face, though he doesn't tell anyone how he got it.

Much as with Laura Palmer and the town of Twin Peaks, Carolyn's disappearance haunts the sleepy Midwestern town of Big River (Reeder shot the film in Chicago). Her single mother, Lisa (Marika Engelhardt), the high school choir teacher, seems dazed, but then, she seemed dazed on the night of the disappearance when she was skulking around their house with a knife. In one of my favorite scenes, Lisa, while wearing Caroline's green sequin-covered dress, leads the choir in a lovely, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares-like version of the Go-Go's "Our Lips Are Sealed."

Ireon Roach, Grace Smith, and Kayla Carter

As we get to know the other parents, we find that they're pretty weird, too. Andy's seamstress mother, Lynn Kitzmiller (Audrey Francis), who wears the same over-sized, lion-face t-shirt daily, spends most of her time snoozing on a tin foil-covered pillow. It isn't clear what's eating her, but it looks a lot like depression. Her husband, Dan (Tim Hopper), lost his job, but he hasn't had the heart--or the courage--to tell her. As for Sheriff Doug Darlington (James Vincent Meredith), his wife, Renee (Kate Arrington), is pregnant and he's more annoyed than excited about it; everybody thinks the baby belongs to Dan with whom she's been having an affair. They're both right and wrong about the kid. The Kitzmiller and Darlington daughters were among Carolyn's best friends, although, unlike Laura Palmer, no one was especially thrilled about her. Like many teen girls, she could be careless and cruel. 

Life goes on. Renee continues to see Dan, who dresses up like a clown when they get together, and Lisa, whose makeup becomes increasingly smeared, continues to wear her daughter's clothes, from poufy party dresses to heart-patterned angora sweaters. Then one day, Carolyn's friends receive a text from her. It doesn't mean she sent it, in which case someone used her phone, but it's unclear who would do such a thing.

Things only get stranger from there as a t-shirt talks back to its owner, a student sells her mother's used underwear to a teacher, and a different teacher, a substitute, put the moves on the same student. Beyond the comparisons to Twin Peaks, Knives and Skin evokes other not-quite-horror films in which surrealism comes to the suburbs, like Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko and Gregg Araki's Kaboom, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

None of this is played with a wink. For all I know, Reeder may find some of it as silly as audiences are likely to, but the deadpan vibe and Nick Zinner's dreamy score suggest otherwise. The supernatural aspect, meanwhile, doesn't spring from mystical elements--with the exception of a wound that won't heal--as much as the diegetic music that comments on the action as if the participants all decided, in unison, to sing. It happens at the choir practice with the Go-Go's song and continues with Modern English's "Melt With You," Naked Eyes' "Promises, Promises," and other numbers, all of which come from the 1980s, possibly an acknowledgment that Knives and Skin wouldn't exist without the precedent set by David Lynch with Blue Velvet in 1986 before he expanded on similar ideas with Twin Peaks four years later.

Reeder eventually provides the resolution to Carolyn's disappearance. She had dropped clues along the way, so it doesn't come from out of nowhere, but it works. If the weirdest stuff in the film falls the flattest, like a couple of food-throwing scenes, I found the end unexpectedly touching. Turns out the filmmaker had one more 1980s-oriented magic trick up her sleeve.



Knives and Skin is available to stream through iTunes and Google.