Skinamarink: A Dreamy, Experimental, No-Fi Nightmare
Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished.
With a rigid style and an unorthodox visual grammar (somewhat similar to Robert Bresson), Kyle Edward Ball’s debut feature, Skinamarink, denies viewers the standard film conventions to create a horror experience unlike any in recent memory. Much of it consists of close-up shots of ceilings, door frames, hallways, feet/legs, toys strewn on carpet, and public-domain cartoons on TV, often from a low angle, with the digital photography being degraded to within an inch of its life and the audio so severely muffled or inaudible that it’s always accompanied by subtitles. You don’t really see much of anything, including the faces of the actors, but what makes the film so effective — and interesting — is what it decidedly does not show. It’s anti-cinema that cleverly uses its strict style and self-imposed obstructions to construct an unsettlingly dreamy world that’s largely driven by each audience member’s imagination.
The film primarily revolves around two young children, Kevin and Kaylee, who become trapped in their house when the windows, doors, and even the toilet mysteriously disappear, along with their parents. To bide the time, the kids cozy up in the false safety of the living room, illuminated by the eerie glow of cartoons on TV, playing with legos and napping on the couch when they’re not calling out for mommy and daddy. The more Kevin and Kaylee tough it out, the more they start to believe they’re not alone. Their suspicions are confirmed when a disembodied voice ominously beckons out from the darkness: “Come upstairs,” “Come to the basement,” and even a request to “Put the knife in your eye,” which is something that Kevin seems to oblige. That is essentially the extent of Skinamarink’s plot, but it’s a film less concerned about communicating a narrative than it is establishing a mood and delivering a feeling, something it does remarkably well.
Every decision Ball makes is meant to service this and coerce us into the headspace of Kevin and Kaylee. We are made to feel their purgatorial confinement, and we ponder what may be out there lurking in the dark of the house the same as they do. His staunch style — which was developed via his YouTube channel, Bitesized Nightmares, piloted in his short film, Heck, and further refined here — gives us just enough information to understand what is happening, but it very seldom gives us the full picture. We see everything in close-up fragments and have to intuit the action through context a lot of the time; for instance, a shot of a blanket being dragged across the floor tells us that the kids are mobile. The visual approach is alienating, but, again, that’s pretty much the point; it isolates us in the same way the strange event isolates the children. This device also forces us to feel the sands of time as they slowly fall, much in the same way the kids do. The film could be slimmed down a bit — particularly within its first 30 minutes — but to do that would potentially undercut its sense of ennui.
With no clear answers or explanation provided, we are forced into the surreal nightmare where the rules of logic and gravity no longer apply, and we try our best to make sense of the film’s events. Could it all be a nightmare (perhaps brought on by Kevin’s head injury)? Are the children and their parents dead? Are we just seeing a bizarro haunting? Your guess is as good as ours, and the answer isn’t really the point. Just like wading through a dream of your own, you either submit to its amorphous logic or you fight against the experience, and the same is true of Skinamarink. You will have to resist the urge to fend off “boredom” with distractions as you wait for something to happen, and the waiting is the film’s prime method of developing suspense, tension, and atmospheric dread as it undulates between sleepwalking and lucid states. You keep waiting for something to emerge from the darkness, for something terrible to happen, and like the entity toys with the trapped children, so too does Ball sadistically toy with us and our expectations.
More concerned with creating the feeling of being helpless and trapped than eliciting terror, Ball’s bold experimentation transports us back to our childhood home and seals us inside our creepy, nostalgic tomb where we are left to aimlessly wander as if it were a graveyard. Needless to say, it’s not going to be for everyone. There are many who will not be able to will themselves to finish it, and those who manage to tough it out might flat out hate it, but if you can submit to its eerily nostalgic purgatorial hellscape, you might be pleasantly surprised with the strange and hypnotic ride. We found it to be a rewarding challenge with a resinous quality that lingers like a potent dream
Recommendation: Due to Skinamarink’s unconventional style and cinematic grammar, it won’t appeal to everyone. If you’re into filmic experiments or up for a challenge, we definitely think it’s worth a watch.
Creeping for more?! Check out the link below:
Kaylee, Can We Watch Something Happy Now?: The No-Fi Nightmare Of Skinamarink (audio podcast)
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!