Skinamarink (2022)

directed by Kyle Edward Ball

Canada

100 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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When I started hearing about Skinamarink from places outside of where I usually check for information on upcoming horror, I didn't hesitate to see it as soon as I could. I've been severely out of the loop with recent horror, so I hadn't heard anything about it until I started suddenly seeing people call it the scariest thing they'd ever seen. You can tell that someone is a seasoned horror fan when they're talking about a movie that scared them and their tone is incredulous rather than matter-of-fact; that's what I was getting from the mentions of this movie that I'd read.

This movie is made in a way that is probably unlike anything you've seen before. The first thing you notice as soon as it begins is that the entire thing is shot with a grainy, fuzzy overlay, like watching something on an old CRT TV before the switchover to digital. (Old televisions do in fact play a part in this which I will try to address later.) The other two distinctive things about it are that it is (mostly - later in the film, the perspective gets looser and less concrete) shot from the perspective of a young child, which is in keeping with the fact that the "main characters" are both very young children, and that a lot of it is composed of just static shots. The camera doesn't "follow" the children around much; usually it's either filming from their point of view or sitting still while we see their lower legs walk across the frame. The visual fuzz combined with the growing darkness means that it's almost impossible to stop seeing things where there might not actually be anything there, creating patterns out of swirls in the static that can look like anything. This is definitely a movie that is situated at a specific point of time, because for viewers any younger than myself, their childhood memories might not necessarily be so tied to this kind of dated, grainy picture quality. If you're fairly young, your childhood pictures and videos might be in as good a quality as you could take on your cell phone today. It's a vanishing feeling, the way the warm, indistinct-around-the-edges aspect of home videos shot on camcorder somehow embeds itself in our memories of ourselves as children. Skinamarink captures that feeling and uses it to both comfort and disorient.

For a movie with such a simple idea behind it, where it starts and where it ends up are vastly different in tone. So what is it about? From what I've gathered, it was inspired by an actual dream that the director had as a child. At the beginning of the film the two child protagonists wake up to find that their parents are gone and their house has changed. The doors and windows are gone (also the toilet). As they explore the new topography of their house, other things begin to happen, increasingly unsettling and increasingly unmoored from familiarity. I think "familiarity" and its destruction is the most central tenet of this film, and is the reason why it's so deeply discomfiting. When the film begins, I had trouble feeling like I was going to be as scared by it at all, because personally I have a lot of nostalgia for my childhood, and the way things looked - the perspective of a small person, the grain of the picture, the warm light in the middle of the night when it's dark out and the only illumination in the house are lamps - made me think about what it was like to be a kid awake in the night. But the pleasure of that nostalgic feeling comes from knowing you are safe. Gradually, in Skinamarink, any hope of safety wears off until the once-comfortable home becomes something twisted and claustrophobic. A space that should be cozy becomes alien. Over the course of the film the lights grow dimmer until the kids are navigating places that they should be familiar with by flashlight. The scope contracts; eventually all that exists is what can be seen in front of you. The presence within the house tightens its grip until it feels like the walls start closing in.

I feel like without a doubt Skinamarink is much more deeply frightening when it is doing virtually nothing. The dimming of the light, the perspective of a child, the ultimate fear of your protectors being gone and then later reappearing but not acting like themselves - all of that is horrible enough. The second half of this movie is when it seems to think that isn't enough and begins trying to create a clearer picture of the thing inside the house. And it is a "thing", it is a boogeyman; it isn't just the sense of disorientation that's the only scary part of this film. Something is in the house with the children and it's doing things for no apparent reason. Whether or not a creature is more frightening to you than an unending general sense of unease is a matter of personal taste, and in the moment this mattered to me, but afterwards, now, thinking about the film, I really don't have a problem with anything in it. It's the same way when we first see blood and the implication that something physically traumatic is happening, instead of just creeping dread. Watching the film, I thought "oh, this isn't a film where there should be any violence, this has to all be implied and subtle" but now I see that all fears are sort of linked back to the fear of bodily harm, so the presence of blood is still in keeping with the overall atmosphere.

The use of public-domain cartoons and sounds also bothered me initially because it's something that always bothers me when I'm watching a movie and it's not otherwise brought up - I just feel like somebody sitting down and watching a Flesicher-esque cartoon and laughing at it like any children's show is an unrealistic scenario. It always feels really obvious to me when someone is using copyright-free sounds or images to get around paying royalties (even though I understand why they'd do that). Here, though, it fits. The stretchy, often disturbing quality of old cartoons works perfectly with how malleable reality feels in this film. Late in the film, one moment in a cartoon is played over and over, a Bugs Bunny ripoff shrinking itself into nothing with an up-slide sound effect. Something about that is so striking. Sometimes as a kid you're watching TV and you see something, just a line or a few seconds of animation, and it feels wrong somehow and stays with you for years. It could be a normal moment or scrap of dialogue, but you misinterpret it and it hits you in a particular way that doesn't let your brain let go of it. That's what that felt like.

As the film goes on it loses all semblance of narrative and becomes a collection of images of a house where something is very wrong. Dimensions don't make sense like they used to and all light gets swallowed up by what seems like a miasmic malignance. There are strong shades of House of Leaves. At one point the camera becomes seemingly trapped in a warping, endless, inverted closet along with a heap of toys, and the subtitle on the screen reads "576 days" - this I could not figure out, and it's still bothering me. Was that meant to imply how long the remaining child had been trapped in the house? It could not have been his age, because we can guesstimate (and we hear him say) that he's about four years old. That little detail was a curiosity that I would love to know the real meaning behind. I'm also not sure what the point was of including a conversation the kids' father has where we hear him talking about one of the kids falling down the stairs and hitting his head - was that meant to cast doubt on anything that happens afterward, implying that it could have been a hallucination? I certainly hope not, because that would be disappointingly cliched.

This is getting long, so to sum it up I'll just say that Skinamarink truly is incredibly eerie in a way that I don't know that I've ever seen a movie be before. Examining it is rewarding in that we can see references to earlier films and figure out why exactly it frightens us, but it's really something that, if you're seeing it for the first time, you have to sit and absorb and not let yourself think too hard about to get the full experience. It feels like watching a home movie that was shot inside of a nightmare. The intimate, personal nature of it, the universality of the childhood experience of having a bad dream that you wake up from and believe was true for a little while, brings this out of the realm of fiction to an unsettling degree. I don't think another movie in this style could be made again, but I would love to see where else this director goes. At the moment it's not available anywhere but the small screen, but I have heard that it is getting a limited theater release in January and I would highly, highly recommend everybody who can goes to see it that way. I watched this directly before going to bed (inadvisable!) and walking around my dark house afterwards felt so strange.