Skinamarink will baffle you, then haunt your dreams
Skinamarink. // Courtesy Shudder
The divisive (and unnecessary) term “elevated horror” is often used to describe horror films with arthouse sensibility—big, serious ideas and visual creativity. Stuff with a budget for nice cameras and dynamic locations. The truth is that horror has always had capacity for fun, disturbing imagery and artistic depth at every budget level, regardless of distribution model. In 2022, Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair proved just that. In 2023, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink continues that tradition. Existing somewhere between student film and experimental cinema, Ball’s tone poem of a movie is one of the most unique, challenging and divisive horror entries in quite some time.
Summarizing Skinamarink concisely is difficult, in that not much happens, much is implied rather than shown, and most of what we do see isn’t explained. The basics are that some time in 1995, four-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) and six-year-old Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) wake up in the middle of the night to find they are home alone. The house has been transformed, the doors and windows somehow erased. In their place are silence, darkness, and a distorted voice that calls out to the children, beckoning them to the bowels of the house.
Kevin and Kaylee are a prominent source of the movie’s unnerving sense, mostly because they’re acting like kids for most of the runtime. As a monstrous presence looms, they still eat cereal, watch cartoons and play with Legos. Skinamarink carries a The Blair Witch Project vibe in seeing Kaylee and Kevin react to things around them in ways that feel unscripted, growing more unsettling as events grow more dire and harrowing. These kids are trapped, lit only by flashlights or the glow of a CRT TV that elicits nothing but mounting existential dread.
Arguments about the film’s narrative core (or lack of it) aside, Ball has created an aesthetic masterpiece, one comprised of a deafening soundscape, odd angles, and a diabolical use of digital noise. Finite detail is of the utmost importance to Ball and cinematographer Jamie McRae. Every shot selection, every pause, or use of lighting is deliberate, ratcheting up the tension as much as possible.
McRae shoots from odd nooks and crannies that make Kevin and Kaylee seem like ghosts in their own home; they’re never framed in the traditional sense, instead framed as bisected limbs, outlines and silhouettes. The few times they’re seen in full feel like a warning, as do the moments the camera focuses on ceiling corners or underneath couches.
Skinamarink is the rare film that understands the scariest thing in the world isn’t seeing the thing going bump in the night but hearing that bump and then staring into the darkness. Stare long enough at the corner of the frame and you just might find something staring back. This is a singular, daring experience that you can’t stop thinking about, no matter how many times you’d prefer not to. It’s the kind of movie that makes you wake up at 2 a.m., peering at the end of your bed, telling yourself you didn’t just hear a distant voice beckoning you to peek beneath the mattress.
