Let’s talk about the most talked about movie of the year, Skinamarink.
So what does skinamarink actually mean. It is a gibberish word that’s used in a pleasantly annoying children’s song. And surprisingly it is an appropriate and more than likely intentional title for this movie. Because the movie is gibberish, in more ways than one, and it’s from more or less the point of view of children.
Skinamrink is an experimental horror flick that has polarized audiences. You either love it or you hate it, sadly I fall in the latter camp. The plot, if you can call it that, follows two children who wake up in the middle of the night to realize their parents are not home. Vanished. Gone. The kids try to make the most of the situation by dragging their legos in front of the television. But weird things start happening doors disappear, leaving no escape for the kids, phones turn into toys, even the toilet puffs away into thin air. All the while a demonic voice calls out to the kids telling them to do bad things.
I will say, my synopsis of the movie, is about 60% more exciting than the actual movie which takes it time at a languid pace. It spends its time lingering on strange camera angles. We get close ups of old cartoons on antique tv sets. We spend time looking at all the nooks and crannies of the house. We get look stretches of peering into complete darkness, waiting for something to pop out and scare us… but nothing ever comes.
This movie has no intention of telling a traditional narrative. It is after all, experimental. I’ve seen people compare it to the likes of The Blaire Witch Project, which the only comparison I see that is that the movie is polarizing and ends on an ambiguous note. Others have compared it to David Lynch’s Eraserhead. I don’t understand that one, as Eraserhead does have an overarching theme to its weird images. Skinamarink on the other hand is more one note in theme and tone. If I were to compare it to anything, I would suggest that it’s more like the experimental films of Stan Brakhage or Hollis Frampton, who both made short films that are described as mood pieces. They both used swaths of colors in motion or filmed everyday objects in an obscure light to create a sense of atmosphere. Their films would usually last a few minutes. Skinamarink lasts an hour and 40.
That being said, Skinamarink does overstay its welcome. It would have been better serviced as a short film, or even a series of shorts. The thread that tries to hold the narrative together is just too thin. But like the short films of Brakhage and Frampton, it is more of a mood piece. I don’t think director, Kyle Edward Ball, had any intention on making anything other than a mood piece. He wanted to find the horror from behind the eyes of a child. And granted, when I was a kid, I remember my mom driving me to my grandmother’s house in the dark. I would look out the window at the naked tree branches and see faces and monsters in them. But I if I were to make a feature length movie that had nothing but tree branches in it, it wouldn’t be too entertaining.
But I will say that the movie is a triumph of good sound design. The scratches in the audio, the different pitches in the sparse dialogue, and the jump scares from bumps and bangs off camera tries to hold the movie together. The sound really sells what limited scares there are in the film.
I read one negative review that called this a “creepypasta”. This term was new to me, and to my disappointment it has nothing to do with haunted noodles. Instead creepypasta is catch-all term for any horror content posted onto the Internet. Short horror films and stories that are told in TikToks or YouTube videos. And I think I would have enjoyed Skinamarink a lot more if it were in these tiny spooky pastas form, instead of waiting 100 minutes for the creature under my bed to never show up.
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