Gregg Araki returns with Mysterious Skin, a tough and confronting tale about two very damaged young men, based on a novel by Scott Heim and which screened at Venice Film Festival.

Some 10 years earlier, an eight-year-old Brian Lackey found himself in the cellar at the back of the family home, his nose bloodied and his memory razed of the preceding five hours. Now 18, Brian is convinced that he had been abducted my aliens. Also aged 18, Neil McCormick is a seductive outsider - a beautiful young man that everybody loves but no-one wants to get close to. Neil makes his way in the world by peddling his only asset to men looking for trysts with adolescent boys. Neil's search for what he thinks is love leads him to New York, and Brian's search for the missing five hours of a decade earlier leads him to Neil. These are two very different young souls, but their differences are merely symptomatic of their commonality, which lies in their disturbing shared past.

Contains scenes that may offend some viewers