User reviews

Based on a true story of a 15 year old Rachel Barber's abduction in Australia, In Her Skin is disturbing to say the least. The movie chronicles the real events that happened before, after, and during this tragic abduction and the many different lives it touched.

Rachel Barber goes missing and everyone that knew her knew something was amiss but the Barber family was forced to wait 48 hours before the police would get involved. As her parents frantically look for her and blanket the neighborhood with pictures, we get to see glimpses of her past and the pasts of many people involved in this case .It soon unfolds and the truth is revealed in this psychological thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Guy Pearce and Miranda Otto translate incredible emotion and anger as Rachel's parents but for me the standout here was Ruth Bradley as Caroline Reid. Sam Neill also played an overwhelmed, distant parent of Caroline very well as this movie moves swiftly and smoothly through the horrifying truth of this well directed and acted film.

I watched this film on demand and was impressed with the overall production. In Her Skin reminded me a lot of The Lovely Bones, which I also enjoyed, that starred Mark Wahlberg. This movie is definitely worth a watch in my opinion

The title it played in Germany at the Fantasy Filmfest. A very strange little movie, that is very dark and will very likely appall a lot of people (if they don't know what they're in for especially), because of it's theme, but also because of it's graphic nature (at times, not that often, but still quite disturbing).

The actors involved in here are all good, Guy Pearce giving a better performance (there must be a better script at hand I reckon) than in "Don't be afraid of the Dark". One of our lead actresses has to go to really tough places and she manages to do so very convincingly. Not for everyone and I'm not sure "enjoy" would be the right word to use after watching it, but this is a really good work of art!

I absolutely loved this film. I was totally gripped start to finish.

The mix of surreal camera work and character chapters made the horrific subject matter all then more intense and difficult to deal with, as it should be. The story itself suited the surreal elements that reflected the characters states of mind. All of these mixed elements create a bizarre world inside a real one, which enables the viewer to, to some extent, empathize and imagine the kind of horrors that the people these characters are based on must gone through.

Ruth Bradley, who plays Caroline is absolutely astonishing. She switches between creating terror or sympathy and is nothing short of completely convincing.

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 1999, in Melbourne, the Babers are a happy middle-class family, and the fifteen-year-old ballerina daughter Rachel Barber (Kate Bell) is in love with her boyfriend Manni (Khan Chittenden), who dances with her. One night, Mr. Barber (Guy Pearce) is waiting for Rachel at the tram station, but she never appears. On the next morning, Mrs. Barber (Miranda Otto) and he go to the police to report that their daughter is missing, but the police detective does not give much attention, believing Rachel is a runaway home. However, Mr.& Mrs. Baker do not give up and distribute missing person pamphlets along the tram route. Manni discloses to them that Rachel had been invited by an older woman for a confidential job to earn a great amount that would allow Rachel to buy the desired ballet slipper. Meanwhile, the unstable teenager Caroline Reid Robertson (Ruth Bradley), who has inferiority complex, low self-esteem, depression and eventual seizures due to the medicines she must take, sees Rachel and Manni making out in a bench on the street. She was a former front door neighbor to the Barber family, with divorced parents, that idolized Rachel and tried to imitate her. Her obsession increased over the years, and she plots a plan to lure Rachel and bring her to her apartment. What will happen to Rachel?

"In Her Skin" (2009) is a dramatic Australian thriller based on a true story. The screenplay is very well written, showing the story by different point of views from the family and the killer. Unfortunately, this DVD was not in my priority list of my collection and only yesterday I saw this great film. The sad story is very well-acted and despite the names of Guy Pearce, Miranda Otto and Sam Neill, the unknown Ruth Bradley steals the movie with her magnificent performance as an insane teenager. How Caroline transported Rachel's body to hide at the farmer of her father is never explained. Was her wealthy father involved? Further, the sentence of twenty years imprisoned with the right to probation after fourteen years is absolutely unfair to the Barbers, who lost a beloved fifteen-year-old daughter in a planned murder. It seems that the Australian justice system has similar problems to the Brazilian one. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Vítima Perfeita" ("The Perfect Victim")

This a powerful movie with a long lasting impression. I think Simone did a fantastic job with this story. She kept to the actual events of what happened to Rachel, her family, friends as well as Caroline without glorifying it, sugar coating it and hollywoodising it. It is real and it is raw. This is what happened and this is how the people involved experienced it. The acting is fantastic, the way the scenes flow and the cinematography is excellent. Along with the true story there are messages to take from it, one being involved and recognizing mental illness, as we know is a massive and growing problem in the community.

It's basically a Sunday morning TV film. The current rating is very misleading, don't waste your time unless you want to suffer for 108 minutes of your life. The acting was surprisingly poor, may be with the exception of Ruth Bradley's performance. I can't believe Guy Pierce or Sam Neil took part in such a mediocre movie.

The story had a lot of potential but the movie didn't live up to it. In the realm of true crime adaptations, this film falls short of capturing the gripping intrigue and emotional depth that the genre demands. While the source material offers a compelling narrative, the movie struggles to translate it into a captivating cinematic experience. Characters feel underdeveloped, and crucial moments lack the tension necessary to keep audiences invested. While it may hold fleeting interest for true crime enthusiasts, it ultimately fails to leave a lasting impact or offer any significant insights into the case it seeks to portray.

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.

Anyone whose child has gone missing, even momentarily, will connect with the earliest moments of this version of true events, but, perhaps only those for whom the loss remains unresolved for any serious length of time will know how close to their reality this film touches. It is almost relentlessly tough to watch because there is no place for pressure to be relieved, however briefly, by a joke, a glimmer of hope, a slither of a flaw to make us remember we are watching a dramatised version of events. I even find it tough to judge the quality of the acting because too often this film seems so vividly, so uncomfortably, and so chillingly real. I am, if truth be told, just in awe of all the performances I have witnessed and I still have to pinch myself to remember it was "just a film". Is that a compliment?

I felt tears on my cheeks three times during this film, not because I was sad, but because my being had to have an outlet and I couldn't laugh or smile. The emptiness, pointlessness, coldness, loneliness of a missing loved one is so bitingly portrayed and yet saying "okay that's enough, I have got your point" is as futile as the parents of Rachel Barber shouting "Rachel come home" on every street corner they could.

I remember Hitchcock being heavily criticised by some in the industry for a seven minute killing sequence in "Torn Curtain" when that was easier to justify because it was a work of fiction and a thriller rather than "a week or so in the real life of a family". And so I had mixed feelings about "I Am You" when I reflected on some of the things I had seen, including the closing statements popular with "factual" drama.

I am left with these mixed feelings ranging from the reality of the acting to the old adage that imagination is always more powerful than a picture, from the top to the bottom of the things I should feel. And ultimately I cannot give this film a points score because it doesn't feel like it entered the cinematic league stakes. It is a film and if you see it you will feel what it does to you rather than want to talk about to friends. And that IS tough.

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 Namaste

cliff DXB

Rated 5 for a slightly slow screenplay, including some scenes that frankly felt like they were only there to extend the film out to feature length. A 7 for Miranda Otto, who is always good. And a 9.0 for Ruth Bradley, a name I had never heard before, who was downright disturbingly good. The early scenes of her as a deeply depressed teenager are heartrending. And in the pivotal scene, Ms. Bradley was absolutely blood chilling. Not to be morbid, but she was so good that the movie would have been better if it had focused more time on the main character and her mental state, than the victims family.

It was the star names of Guy Pearce and Sam Neill that made me look twice when scrolling through Sky Movies 'Anytime' selection.

Guy has often been excellent and Sam's always a solid performer and I had hopes that this might be above your average TV 'missing persons case of the week', with some adult-orientated content and good acting.

There's a lot of surface stylised gloss that might seem superfluous, at least initially, in what is essentially a depiction of the shattering life of the outgoing, confident 15 year old Rachel (Kate Bell). She's sexy and with a boyfriend who she is obviously besotted with. Guy Pierce, is husband to Miranda Otto and are the parents to Rachel and they are the ones who raise the alarm to a unsympathetic police.

Sam Neill plays the business-man father of the emotionally troubled Caroline and he is caught between his awkwardness around and toward his daughter (an excellent Ruth Bradley) and to him, his more interesting and productive work-life.

However, the swirling and sweeping camera and heightened experience that director Simone North (who's been in TV production since the 80s, inc. The Flying Doctors) uses certainly makes the film more watchable. There's also a fair amount of fantasy and psychological sequences and cross-cutting of time zones, which does make piecing the events together a little confusing at times, but it does gel after a while.

As the film progresses, we see how these two girls interact and how their friendship might have contributed to the initial outcome. I'm going to leave the plot there - if you watch it then you'll find out more. This is not the sort of film that I would have wanted to pay to see, either at the Cinema, nor as a DVD rental. It's OK as a weekday filler feature, but to be honest, nothing much more than that. 6/10, or 3 stars.

I have always been a fan of Guy Pearce (who will always be remembered as Mike from Neighbours in the UK)who is an actor that always seems to appear in decent films. On that basis I decided to watch this small Australian film.

The film covers a real life case of a 15 year old girl who inexplicably goes missing from home. We see the reaction of her parents the excellent Pearce and Miranda Otto as they struggle to get the police to take the disappearance seriously. The film then concentrates on of the suspects a former babysitter played with chilling menace by Ruth Bradley and her father played by the dependable Sam Neill. The final part and weakest part of the film follows the missing girl.

The subject matter doesn't really make for happy viewing and for that i cannot bring myself to give it a higher mark, yet it is an excellently made film and one of the best of it's type I have seen. It certainly deserves a wider audience.

Be warned that one of the scenes in particular is extremely disturbing and may upset a lot of viewers.

Depicts events wrong, acting is subpar, doesnt do the victim justice. Could of been great, but a wasted opportunity. Also, no need to show her naked at all. Really exploitive and dishonorable to the victim.

This one bored me to tears, and I had to quickly find the ffw button. So many poor scenes and bad acting by professionals who are trying to hard. Unconvincing.

Not much to see here, a lot of running around and bad camera angles. I can't think of anything good to say about this movie, just a bad watch overall.

2/10, true story and the screenwriter can't seem to convert it to film. Keeps removing accurate events and replacing them with some sex scenes and other nonsense in hopes that it will sell. It doesn't.

This one bored me to tears, and I had to quickly find the ffw button. So many poor scenes and bad acting by professionals who are trying to hard. Unconvincing.

Not much to see here, a lot of running around and bad camera angles. I can't think of anything good to say about this movie, just a bad watch overall.

2/10, true story and the screenwriter can't seem to convert it to film. Keeps removing accurate events and replacing them with some sex scenes and other nonsense in hopes that it will sell. It doesn't.

A film with many names. "I am you" originally, turned to "In her skin" and in other countries the rather over used and not very original "Missing".

Already in the opening scene you realize this is film which will be pleasant on your eyes. A great opening scene! Beautifully shot, great camera movements, and great setting of emotional feelings, as well as colors and sounds. This is a film which is eye candy, though it's a bleak true story.

The film starts with a young daughter, Rachel, going missing on her way from dance practice. The parents know that this is serious, but as always, the police doesn't. Then we tend to another story, about Caroline, which has a mental illness, which affects not only the near family.

The film's problem is that the stories are starting over and over in the beginning and takes away the tension. This doesn't help the story telling. Too bad, because there's such an amount of talent here. I think a more traditional storyline would have done different. Without this, the film would have gotten a better score. Still a great story, but the jumping doesn't allow a proper story building for this to become a classic.

The mother of Caroline and her crying didn't convince me, but the cast is doing a great job. Amazing acting. A-class. Ruth Bradley is amazing in her role as Caroline.

The film reminded me of "Black swan" in more than one way. Both the mental illness, the ballet dancing and the overall quality. Well picked score, heavy on emotion. A great Film, and one if the better Australian films I've seen.

Iv just read the other reviews for this film and I am left wandering if it was the same film we are watching. The review by SEPIAL forces me to lean towards that feeling that I get more and more from some of the reviews on IMDb that...it is actually the film's director reviewing this film ( or someone who had something to do with the film). If that is the case then here is a tip: Don't make excuses for your work or try and talk us through it, that just tells the vultures where to circle.

As far as the film is concerned, on paper it looked good. Love the actors. Don't know what they were doing in this. Well, maybe I do. Again, on paper it must have looked good for an actor, something to sink your teeth into. The issues are all serious and dark and the ingredients are all there. But the biggest problem that i can put my finger on is that it can't seem to make it's mind whether it is a realistic, gritty drama or a surreal poke at dark emotions and although there is space there for both the mix just doesn't feel right. It sucked. Sorry, I probably would have given it a better review if the actors were not so big and I only expected the little that I got.