 Skinamarink isn’t concerned about the fears we can articulate, even if only vaguely, but the deeper emotional states - loss, grief, despair - that cannot be spoken about because there is nothing there to speak of. Skinamarink Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished. Initial release: 25 July 2022 Directors: Kyle Edward Ball, Kyle Ball Cast: Jaime Hill, Dali Rose Tetreault, Ross Paul, Lucas Paul Distributed by: IFC Films A Horror Movie Review by Daniel Pietersen When I was young, six or maybe seven years old, I used to wake up in the night, convinced something was in the room with me. I say “something” because whatever it was never felt like a person and I say “felt like” because I never actually saw anything there. Even “thing” is too full a word for the strange sense of absence that hovered in the corner of my room. By the window. Looking at me. A hole that hovered there, waiting for me to turn my head and open my eyes. Even though that was absolutely the last thing I wanted to do. It didn’t come every night, not even often, but when it did I lay awake in the dark, absolutely terrified of nothing. Worse than nothing; a shadow where nothing should’ve been. Eventually it stopped coming or, at least, I never noticed it again. A deeply human fear of the dark amplified by an only child’s over-active imagination. I still remember the sense of heart-stopping terror, though, and of feeling unsafe in my own home, in my own bed. In my own head. I mention this cheerful little anecdote only because this abyssal, suffocating terror is exactly how Skinamarink made me feel. Skinamarink is a very curious film. It’s arguable whether it’s even truly a film at all; the characters are vague sketches, there is often simply nothing to see on the screen and to say that the plot is implied rather than stated is generous to say the least. Yet the gravity of this absence, these gaps where the muscles and machinery of a film should be, pulled me in until I realised, with a sharp gasp of claustrophobia, that I couldn’t get out. After its achingly retro opening titles, Skinamarink starts as it means to go on with a series of static shots depicting the various corners and corridors of a nondescript house at night, all filmed through a murky and near-impenetrable gauze of grain and fuzz. Curtains and skirting boards, door frames and light switches. Everything is rendered down to abstract forms as indistinct sounds that might be voices mutter in the background. It’s not long before faces begins to leer out of the darkness, as pareidolia demands our minds find patterns in randomness, only to resolve themselves into a fireplace or pile of toys. We’re introduced to two young siblings, Kevin and Kaylee, who wake in the night to find that their father has disappeared. Kevin wonders, in a hushed whisper, that “maybe he went with Mom”. After a pause, uncomfortably long, Kaylee replies that “I don’t want to talk about Mom”. This inability to talk is, for me, exactly what the film is about. One of the few scraps of exposition in the film comes when a faltering voice, we assume it must be the the father’s, explains how Kevin recently hurt his head while falling down the stairs so the film may simply be a concussed child’s nightmare, replayed like an old home movie on a tattered backdrop. It could be an attempt to render a child’s experience of trauma or abuse; the hyper-focus on bright toys and slapstick cartoons feels like a way to ignore the house’s otherwise claustrophobic and oppressive surroundings. Or perhaps Kevin and Kaylee have indeed fallen into the clutches of some snickering entity, slowly fading into incoherence and white noise. Maybe all of them are true, in their own way, but whether that’s the case just doesn’t matter. Skinamarink is not about explanations but the things we don’t want explained, can’t even bear talking about. It is about those gaps of comprehension that yawn into chasms when we stare into them for too long. Skinamarink isn’t concerned about the fears we can articulate, even if only vaguely, but the deeper emotional states - loss, grief, despair - that cannot be spoken about because there is nothing there to speak of. The concept of loss, and the realisation that one is becoming lost, permeates this film as the fabric of the children’s home starts to fail and disappear, slowly falling into the eerily lymphatic gaps between the truly real. Critics of the film have argued that almost nothing of note happens over Skinamarink’s 100 minute duration and this is perhaps true but, for me, the long periods of near-silence and immobility serve only to heighten the brief moments of activity. The extended, unchanging shots of inconsequential house-fittings start to feel like a form of sleep-paralysis and there is a queasy lurch in the stomach when the camera angle changes, flicking to another part of the house or panning slowly through the gloom. I can see entirely how this might feel like nothing to someone looking for a more traditional piece of film with a plot and a script but this scrutiny of the mundane makes the film’s internal world become ever more strange and unfathomable. The same critics also argue that the film simply isn’t frightening and this, however, is an opinion I can’t agree with. Granted, there is no obvious source of fear - no monster or axe-murderer - and I strongly believe that the few jump-scares scattered through its run-time actually harm the film, serving to relieve the otherwise inescapable and distressing sense of dread, but the sequence after a burbling half-voice is subtitled as asking Kaylee to “come upstairs” is one of the most horrible episodes I can think of witnessing in film. It’s up there with Eleanor frantically demanding to know “whose hand was I holding” in The Haunting or the click of the TV turning itself on at the end of Ring. It made me seize up, choking, precisely because the terror comes not from being explicitly shown what is happening but from being forced to relive the childlike confusion of not knowing what might yet happen. We witness events locked into Kaylee’s own viewpoint as she looks cautiously around her parents’ bedroom and when a voice, close and whispering, calls her name the camera’s reluctance to turn to its source echoes Kaylee’s own fear of seeing a presence which should be absent. Kaylee isn’t threatened physically but she suffers a deeper harm in that the certainties she holds about how the world works are unraveled in front of her eyes. Skinamarink upset me deeply, in a way that still lingers even days after watching it and I think a lot of criticisms of the film stem from the fact that it is fundamentally not enjoyable to watch but only functions when the viewer understands that it is a horrible, abhorrent experience to endure. There is nothing here that’s fun or technically impressive, no action to follow and no soundtrack to cue our emotions into what we should expect. It denies even the gruesome theatre of what we might expect from a horror film in favour of whispers and suggestions. There is, crucially, no narrative resolution; the film simply stops. Skinamarink is an experimental film in multiple ways and it is an experiment which isn’t always completely successful but in the depths of its murky innards lurk some dark and shining gems of a beauty that not everyone will appreciate or even dive deep enough to witness. Daniel Pietersen Daniel Pietersen is the editor of I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales of R Murray Gilchrist, part of the British Library's Tales of the Weird series. He is also a regular contributor to publications like Dead Reckonings, Horror Homeroom and the Romancing the Gothic project, where he is a guest lecturer. Daniel lives in a very old house in a very old town and is slowly becoming very old himself. CHECK OUT OUR MASSIVE ROUNDUP OF THE BEST IN LGBTQ YA HORROR FICTION BELOW THE HEART AND SOUL OF HORROR MOVIE REVIEW WEBSITES |
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