Skinamarink is the latest indie horror film that it seems everyone is increasingly talking about. It was made by a guy named Kyle Edward Ball, for a budget of $15,000. Several people posted TikTok videos praising this film to high heaven, saying it was the scariest film they had ever seen, etc. I went ahead and watched it last night. It felt like an anolog horror/creepypasta fever dream. In some ways effective, in other ways, not so much.
The premise of the story is simple. You see several shots of the inside of a house. None of the characters are really shown on screen, you mostly hear them talking, or see low angle shots of them walking or the backs of their heads. The 2 young children are Kevin and Kaylee, and you overhear the father talking on the phone with the kids' mother about an injury Kevin got when he fell while sleepwalking. Then the kids wake up in the middle of the night to find the parents are gone, and the doors and windows have suddenly vanished. They decide to go downstairs and watch some old cartoons on TV. From there, things begin to slowly get creepy.
The film is very experimental, with grainy quality camera shots, the audio is heavy, filled with static and distortion, and several scenes of whispering or garbled dialogue, sometimes subtitled, other times not. While some scenes are effective, including one where the little girl Kaylee follows what appears to be her parents voice upstairs, too much of it's 100 minute runtime is filled with scenes of walls, ceilings, doorways, etc, with nothing really happening. You'll get a potentially interesting development, then 10 - 15 minutes of nothing interesting happening, followed by tension build up and a jump scare (loud noise and a quick image), followed by another several minutes of nothing. It felt like a short story idea that was stretched out to over an hour and a half, and it suffers because of that. It does a great job of capturing the feeling of being in a nightmare, with it's non-linear story telling and refusal to follow a basic plot structure. It's just too bad that the creepy scenes and tension aren't consistent, forcing you to sit through a lot of random shots of the house’s interior.
Skinamarink is bound to be a divisive film among horror fans. Some will praise it's effective, creepy atmosphere, others will be confused as to what all the fuss is about and find it an extremely pretentious borefest. While I have enjoyed plenty of abstract art films (Under The Skin, the movies of David Lynch, The Double Life of Veronique to name a few), I found this one to be overrated. I got what the filmmaker was going for, but it falls short. A few creepy scenes ruined by too many shots of random objects that kill the mood and take you out of the story, leading to an anticlimactic end. It should have been a 30-35 minute short. Ultimately a good premise with flawed execution.
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