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| Courtesy of Mutiny Pictures |
Experimental, grainy replete with print and audio damage
with scratchings, the premise is exceedingly simple: two children wake up in
the middle of the night to find their parents and all the windows leading
outside of the house have disappeared.
As the four-year-old’s Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose
Tetreault) scope the house looking for their parents in between fiddling with
toys and watching old cartoons on a CRT television with that distinctive
flicker only TVs of that kind gave off at night, they become consciously aware
of some sort of voice or entity that repeatedly calls to them. Soon, toys and belongings appear on the
ceiling, the laws of gravity stop mattering and the interior of the house
itself begins to change.
A bit like a Rorschach test on the eyes and ears, best
absorbed in near total darkness with the sound cranked up, peppered throughout
with scares both jumpy and starkly terrifying, Skinamarink is as close
to being like a kid waking up in the middle of the night wandering about the
house afraid of the dark as the movies have ever come. While deliberately slow and minimalist with
frequent empty shots of hallways, carpets and windows which fluctuate in and
out of reality, the sense of unease becomes so unshakable we’re sometimes
locked in suspense without any action.
Sort
of like a lo-fi live-action attempt at adapting Hideo Kojima’s ill-fated P.T.
survival horror game to film, Kyle Edward Bell’s Skinamarink evokes
that same implacable fear we get when we look at a wall or a corner of a room
in the dark and think we see something looking back at us. Another additive to the experience of fear in our own home is the absence of music with the very audible presence of white noise and soft celluloid scratching on the soundtrack. Sounds of an inhuman voice radiating through the house play almost like a paranormal investigator's supposed voice recordings of ghosts which, when heard through the fuzzy soundscape of white noise, are especially hair raising when heard here.
The kind of horror experience that has divided filmgoers in
half with some finding the picture a past-midnight nightmare while others find
its meanderings through dimly lit picture noise to be trying, Skinamarink (currently
touring festival circuits) for my money brought me back to what it felt like to
be a child waking up at night terrified of the darkness surrounding him. While prominently featuring toddlers onscreen
whose fuzzy dialogue is sometimes subtitled, the film is aimed at adult viewers
with moments that were more chilling than some of the loudest and goriest
Hollywood thrillers recently released.
Yes
this is a minimalist indie filmed inside a regular house but through subtle
visual effects and reliance on darkness, the labyrinthine house becomes vast
and easy to lose track of our whereabouts in. Easily one of the creepiest pictures of the
year that managed to capture on film a distinctly childlike fear of the dark in
the abstract, Skinamarink at the end of an already great year for horror
movies is indeed something special.
--Andrew Kotwicki
