Skinamarink (now on Shudder) is an early-2023 horror sensation, a bizarre, experimental and extremely lo-fi creepout session that managed to earn $1.5 million at the box office, roughly 100 times its budget. Frankly, it’s shocking it earned that much, considering its uncompromising minimalism makes The Blair Witch Project look like Ben-Hur. Skinamarink – whose title is an intentional malapropism of preschool song ‘Skidamarink’ (can’t have little ones unintentionally coming across deeply disturbing horror flicks, you know) – stirred up the internet a bit in 2022 after it leaked online and generated buzzy discussion. Now we can fire it up at home and see if its eerie depiction of two little kids trapped in the house alone – or ARE they alone? – sinks into our bones and haunts the marrow.
SKINAMARINK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Consider yourself warned: Skinamarink almost wholly consists of static shots within a single house, all crackly and grainy as if shot with a camcorder that’s straining to see in the dark. It’s 1995. We get a long, slow stare at some Legos on the floor. OK – children live here. Now what? Do we count the Legos? Do we mentally construct something out of them? Do we desperately want to safely gather them before one ends up painfully embedded in a foot? Absolutely! We see a ceiling fan. We see this corner and that corner of the house, the hallway, a door, a stairway, an old tube TV set. Suddenly, a door creaks, but don’t be alarmed – a person opened it. What that person looks like, we’ll never really know. We don’t see any clear faces in this movie, unless you stare long enough at a staticky, near-abstract shot of the living room carpet or the underside of a couch and start to think you’re seeing something nightmarish emerge from the nothingness.
A mom (Jaime Hill) and dad (Ross Paul) live here, with their kids Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), who look to be four or five or six years old. One can only assume if there was a third child, their name would be Kori or Kyle, confirming that these are some of THOSE people. A light comes on, mercifully, but not for long; the film continues its otherwise relentless cycle through its odd-angle shots of furniture, toys, a rumpled blanket, the occasional foot that occasionally moves. Ten minutes in – I kept track – we experience rapture: The camera tilts downward! A veritable TSUNAMI of movement for this movie. The tilt stops on the TV, and stares at it for a long time. [Tink tink] Is Carol Ann in there? [Tink tink tink] Hello?
Things really pick up when we hear a thump, then crying. Kevin fell down the steps. Dad calls Mom on the phone to tell her about it: “Kaylee says he was sleepwalking.” Is this a clue? Or a red herring? KEEP WATCHING, YOU. Some time passes, lord knows how much, and Kevin and Kaylee realize not only that their dad is mysteriously gone, but the doors and windows (and toilet!) are also mysteriously gone. Disappeared. The children seem too young to truly comprehend anything, so it’s hard to tell if they’re scared or how much they’re scared. We see the TV and the corner and a drawer and a stuffie on the floor and get the gist that they’re just going to camp out on the couch and watch cartoons, all of which are old and black-and-white and vaguely unsettling, especially the one where the rabbit makes himself disappear when he draws his hands together.
Sometimes we hear the kids’ dialogue, sometimes it’s distorted and therefore translated via subtitles. There are all kinds of bumps and clunks and squeaks, sometimes from the children’s movements, sometimes from god knows what in the other room or upstairs or the basement or between the walls, but it pretty much always sounds like the boom operator dropping the mic. The kids occasionally hear a strange, warped voice in the darkness, or see the form of their mother and/or father in a dimly lit room. Nobody really moves and the editor cycles through all the static shots and CLUNKs and BUMPs come from indeterminate origins and is that a naked Barbie inexplicably stuck to the ceiling? At one point, someone or something decides to pick up the Legos, possibly because they’re haunted or possibly so they don’t get stepped on, but who can truly tell? Long static shots, long static shots, long static shots – are those shapes in the grain or what? I dunno, but this movie really gives us all kinds of crap to squint at!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A few of the Paranormal Activitys, the aforementioned Blair Witch, maybe just the slightest hints of The Babadook and Poltergeist.
Performance Worth Watching: Skinamarink is 99 percent technique, with minimalist performances. So let’s give it to the sound engineer who appears to have fiddled with and fondled microphones to come up with these lo-est of lo-fi sound FX.
Memorable Dialogue: “I want to play.” – the boogeyman, probably
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: It’s tempting – highly tempting – to dismiss Skinamarink as pretentious twaddle, a nigh-endless patience-testing tease designed to frustrate anyone potentially frustrated by unconventional narratives. It’s tedious, for sure, but not thoughtless, first-time feature director Kyle Edward Ball crafting an evocative submersion into the illogic of a child’s mind. Ball frequently lulls us into a state of intense focus, forcing us to ponder the deeper symbolic meanings of doorways, or stare at toys scattered on the floor until we reflect longingly upon the material and immaterial things we abandoned along with our childhoods. The movie is rather blank-slate-y in that sense, using stillness to create suggestiveness and disorientation to foster unease.
But I also found myself at war with the film, which can be too somnolent for its own good. You’ll find yourself jonesing for a jolt that won’t come but a few times, most in the final moments. When Ball settles on a long, slow stare at an image that fails to evoke a chill or memory, you sense the filmmaker’s calculations – a timely sound effect, a flickering nightlight, a quiet and persistent urging for us to gawk at some mundane scene until we start seeing things that just aren’t there, or wonder if the camera’s moving or not. Some moments are little more than playing flashlight games in the dark with dead-eyed playthings. And yet, the jump-scares are effective enough that I experienced chills in spite of myself, an indication of either my willingness to be manipulated, or the work of a skilled manipulator.
Our Call: I’m mostly on the fence with Skinamarink, but my final calculation is 51 boring/49 provocative. So SKIP IT, unless you’re more willing to be on its slowcore wavelength.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
