Skinamarink

dir: Kyle Edward Ball

2022

What is this movie? What even is a movie, anyway?

If a person was to watch this movie, they could honestly say “welp, I watched something, not entirely sure what it was, but I watched it.” It is generally safe to say that most people would never have seen anything like it before, and hopefully never again. Not voluntarily, I don’t think. Not without a gun pointed at your head.

Skinamarink is some kind of horror movie, but not the kind of horror movie where anything happens or your capacity for absorbing scares or gore is rewarded. The only criterion for watching this flick is patience. The only way to get through the whole flick is even more patience.

The first time I tried to watch this flick, it knocked me the fuck out within 10 minutes. The film is about 100 minutes long. It is mostly long takes of indistinct walls or ceilings, floors or toys, occasionally a tv screen. It is filmed on what looks like degraded video tape, but there is also a filter which makes it also look like degraded film stock (with fake dust and scratches), giving you the feeling that you’re watching something that is a copy of a copy of a copy, and maybe you shouldn’t be watching, or even be able to watch it at all.

There are rarely any people onscreen, and when they are, you never see them clearly. You often see feet, or legs, but they’re not usually doing much of anything. There are no creatures, or monsters, or hideous creatures like Pauline Hansons / Marjorie Taylor Greenes ever appearing on screen to terrorise anyone, least of all the children.

The children… there is a boy and a girl, I’m sure they have names but it hardly matters. These kids are in a house in the middle of the night, and their parents don’t seem to be around. There is a television playing old cartoons from so long ago that they’re out of copyright, and so it costs nothing to have them. If there is any sound or music in the flick that isn’t the kids whispering, it’s from these cartoons. There is no soundtrack or score, so all sounds and music are in the scenes themselves (diegetic sound versus non-diegetic sound).

The kids aren’t alone, though. I don’t know what’s there with them, but it answers when they whisper to it, sometimes. And it doesn’t respond with whispers.

There is something quite terrifying about what we watch, but it’s difficult to articulate as to why. I will struggle mightily to explain myself, but hey, so what.

As a preamble, I will mention a completely different film, that being The Boys by Rowan Woods, that came out in the late 1990s. I have nothing to say about the film itself, or its horrifying plot, and what it referred to (in real life). I only want to talk about the intro and opening credits themselves.

Few times have I watched anything that have inspired as much ominous dread as those opening credits, and yet they consist only of images of mundanity. Wall sockets, light switches, appliances.

Terrifying. Of course the creepy soundtrack from The Necks helps fill this disquieting intro with unholy menace, but it’s their trademark minimalist sound, so it can’t be just that.

Why is it so unnerving, at least to me, and everyone else who’s seen that bit?

I don’t really have an answer, but I do have an observation: There is something inherently unsettling about unoccupied rooms, unoccupied spaces within buildings.

I don’t know if it’s the absence of “something” to occupy our sight, senses. I don’t know if it’s the projection of our fears, of filling that void with something, anything even if it is awful, to avoid facing the void itself.

I don’t know what it is, but I think it’s a primal fear. Maybe it’s also just the fear of the dark, that we all have, that we share with our unreconstructed ancestors.

I can’t really tell whose viewpoint the camera is capturing. Considering the height at which it often is, you might think it’s a kid’s eye view, but I think that doesn’t really capture it. It is certainly aiming for replicating the experience of being a fearful kid, and being in a dark house, where things don’t entirely stay where they should, or look like they did during the day.

This isn’t a “found footage” kind of flick, even though I’ve seen people mention Blair Witch or the Paranormal Activity movies, which is way off. I don’t think we’re meant to think that the camera is someone’s first person perspective.

But then again I say things like that, but I don’t know anything for sure.

The house itself doesn’t seem to want to stay inanimate. The house itself starts to change, with rooms and doors and other areas not staying where they should. That reminded me not of some other film, but of a complicated novel called House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski, which had some freaky goings on and doings transpiring in a house that would not stay quiet.

It’s not a haunted house kind of story. There are no ghosts or spirits that we see, but then it’s what we can’t see that will hurt us, or the kids.

So, okay, I can’t really claim that I understand what goes on in this flick, or that I derived any deeper meanings out of anything, but I can say that I watched it, and it is a movie like no other.

I cannot say whether anyone else would connect with it. I wouldn’t say I connected with it, but I did get something out of it. Again, there are no other movies like it, but it does call to mind a brilliant and bizarre film I saw once called I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House by Osgood Perkins, only because I remember reviewers reviewing that flick and saying “it’s not a movie, it’s really more of a tone poem”, and so risible did I find that phrase that I’ve never forgotten it. It’s one of the single most pretentious things I’ve ever heard in my life, and yet… If the shoe fits jam it on tight anyway.

I wouldn’t call this a “tone poem”, but it is definitely a mood. A discomforting, paralysed-with-terror mood, one which is hard to shake off.

7 times I wonder what it does to someone to spend months making a movie like this out of 10

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“Can we watch something happy now?” – please, let’s - Skinamarink