Writer/Director Kyle Edward Ball’s microbudget feature debut Skinamarink earned critical accolades during its festival run before becoming a viral sensation late last year on TikTok. Its buzzy reputation for terrifying viewers and its title deriving from a children’s song made popular by Sharon, Lois & Bram instilled the expectation for a unique kindertrauma horror movie. While it delivers on its singular vision, its experimental nature and reliance on technique and the power of suggestion will likely polarize.
The 1995-set Skinamarink uses the setup of two young children, Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), waking in the night to find their parents gone along with all windows and doors. The siblings band together around the living room TV with toys and blankets for comfort as they fend for themselves, but it soon becomes clear that perhaps they’re not alone.
Skinamarink eschews conventional storytelling or plot to immerse viewers into the personification of traumatic childhood nightmares through lo-fi ambiance and imagery. Ball and cinematographer Jamie McRae present this nightmare through static shots via grainy analog photography and long takes of shadowed corridors or rooms lit by the hazy blue glow of the television. The striking composition instills an abstract Creepypasta vibe. The camera gazes at empty spaces or eerie imagery, never showing the faces of its child leads or the unseen threat. It’s an innovative means of building atmosphere with dread and fear, giving viewers barely enough context clues to fill those empty spaces.
Accompanying this is the diegetic and ambient sound design that favors crackling noise and whispers so hushed that most of the dialogue is subtitled. The only semblance of a score comes from the cartoons playing on the TV. The ambiguity of the sound and imagery seeks to disorient.
While Ball succeeds in crafting a liminal reality with style, Skinamarink depends on prolonged patience and a willingness to fill in the vast nothingness through imagination. Not much happens in the 100-minute runtime, and the tactics begin to feel repetitive after a while. It winds up running overlong as a result. You’re either on this movie’s peculiar, dreamlike wavelength, or you’re not, and the latter can make this feel more like an endurance test.
Ball recreates that otherworldly feeling of unexplainable nightmares through audio and visual disorientation, trapping viewers in the claustrophobic perspective of Kevin and Kaylee. But Ball is too effective in generating that inescapable feeling; Skinamarink overstretches its minimalist, abstract horror experiment. For some, that’ll instill unnerving terror, while others will find it too impenetrable to engage.
As an overextended, kinder trauma voyage that operates on a vibe over a story, Skinamarink commits fully to its unique approach. Ball’s painstaking recreation of a shared childhood nightmare through lo-fi ambiance on a minuscule budget is commendable. It seems best suited to watch in that half-awake delirious state in the late night hours, home alone with the lights off. There’s no real story to follow; it’s an unsettling mood piece to immerse viewers in a nightmare realm. As impressive as this experiment in terror can be, it’s too sparse to earn its runtime.
Skinamarink releases in theaters on Friday 13, 2023.
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