Skinamarink, 2022.
Directed by Kyle Edward Ball.
Starring Lucas Paul, Dali Rose Tetreault, Ross Paul, and Jaime Hill.
SYNOPSIS:
Two siblings wake up in their home and discover that their parents are not there… or are they?
It is all the fault of The Blair Witch Project, of course. The idea that you can film literal blackness, have nothing happen for almost the full length of a movie and label it as ‘terrifying’ was legitimised by the found footage phenomenon that movie ushered in, and every year, regular as clockwork, a new movie gets released that repeats that very same thing and somehow manages to stick in the public consciousness. And this year, that movie is Skinamarink.
The basic premise is that two siblings – Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) – wake up in their home during what we presume is the night; we presume, because the doors and the windows are either missing or they keep moving. As the camera moves around the house, we see toys and furniture appearing on the ceiling as the children interact with a voice that comes out of the darkness.
And that is about it. Oh yes, we’re in deep psychological metaphor territory here, so deep that one cannot make sense of it and that is supposed to be enough to sustain the nightmare for over 100 minutes and make Skinamarink this year’s most divisive horror movie. Well, it isn’t enough and these low budget/high concept movies that are supposed to tap into your deepest fears by doing very little and supposedly letting your own imagination do all the work are nothing more than concepts or ideas that may work in a short film format but because they’re cheap and don’t require anything more than a disembodied voice saying “BOO!” as someone turns a light on and off they get funded.
Director Kyle Edward Ball got the idea after asking for examples of people’s childhood fears, and you can see the thinking in Skinamarink because, as a child, waking up in the night when the house is dark and everything is different to your safe and bright daytime world, is something we can all relate to, but, quite frankly, the opening credits to Jamie and the Magic Torch (still) do more to bring on those childhood traumas than what we get in this movie, which is essentially incredibly grainy shots of the ceiling and walls of the house from various angles as the children ask where their dad is. Yes, there is an initial curiosity there but after about five minutes the novelty wears off and you realise you still have over an hour-and-a-half of this patronising nonsense to go.
Being experimental is one thing – and all credit to Kyle Edward Ball for getting this made and released because we all know how difficult it is to get a movie off the ground, let alone one as abstract as this – but experiments are prone to failure and Skinamarink – despite what those who bandy around the term ‘elevated horror’ and think it actually means anything will tell you – is not successful in what it is trying to do, unless of course, it was trying to be a tedious and pretentious waste of time, in which case the experiment was a resounding success.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★
Chris Ward
