Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2023)

[acroyear]

Skinamarink

This works because it sells the movie on atmosphere alone.

[dekadetia]

Skinamarink

This works because it sells the movie on atmosphere alone.

Very curious to see how a wider audience responds to this one, because

SpoilerShow

what you see here is what you get: the film really is atmosphere alone. Human faces appear onscreen for mere seconds, bodies no more than a few minutes in total. The rest of the film is basically rooms in a house.

[colinr0380]

And here's Heck, the director's short film from 2020, which appears to be based on the same concept. At least one of the cartoons on the screen (and in the trailer for Skinamarink) is the 1936 Somewhere In Dreamland.

[Murdoch]

Skinamarink

The most depressing film I've seen in recent memory.

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That's largely because it essentially tells the story of two neglected children being maimed, disfigured and killed on a loop for, I assume, eternity.

The divisiveness of the film is understandable, and not because of the spoilered bit above. Its aesthetic is dimly lit rooms and dark doorways. The actors' faces are almost always out of frame, Ball shooting just their torsos or legs. The camera mostly remains motionless, choosing cuts between still shots over panning or zooming . The sparse dialogue consists of children's whispers and is barely audible. Its word-of-mouth buzz and aesthetic bring The Blair Witch Project to mind, which is the closest film I can think of to compare it to in style and substance. I felt like I was watching a nightmare on film, its temporal dream logic heightening the growing sense of unease.

While there are plenty of horror films that place children in danger, none have affected me the same way as this. The minimalist, found footage aesthetic make it feel like a home movie dug up after years of hiding in someone's basement (I felt like Ethan Hawke from Sinister as he watched the unsettling films discovered in his attic). This feeling is only heightened by the performances, or lack thereof, of the children. They speak softly and infrequently, noticeably disquieted by their circumstances. What do they do when they awake to their father missing? They go downstairs, sit in front of the TV and watch cartoons, waiting for an adult to help them.

YMMV certainly. The low budget is apparent, not just because of the minimal aesthetics but also the special effects have a kind of low-grade YouTube quality to them. Still, Ball does a lot with a little and I'll be interested to see the reactions of others here to it.

[brundlefly]

I am glad you were taken with this, even though I wasn't, because it's unfortunate when things like this are just shrugged off. (I could say that I'm more haunted by the song than the movie, and I wouldn't be lying, but I also wouldn't want to be dismissive.)

It can feel primal, can make you feel powerless, can get undeniably creepy. But I found myself either shocked out of its vibe -- it stumbles whenever it tries to make anything happen, those jump scares are desperate -- or zoning out of it and using a lot of the dead time to think instead of feel. I get the Blair Witch comparisons, but there' may be a difference in the real-time mundane or bursts of frantic panic and staring at public domain cartoons for what felt like long, long random stretches. Perhaps a more evident sense of control would have made me feel more controlled. But I very much respect what it was doing, and am impressed this wound up in multiplexes when it could just have easily been an installation you could wander in and out of.

[aox]

Skinamarink

The most depressing film I've seen in recent memory.

SpoilerShow

That's largely because it essentially tells the story of two neglected children being maimed, disfigured and killed on a loop for, I assume, eternity.

The divisiveness of the film is understandable, and not because of the spoilered bit above. Its aesthetic is dimly lit rooms and dark doorways. The actors' faces are almost always out of frame, Ball shooting just their torsos or legs. The camera mostly remains motionless, choosing cuts between still shots over panning or zooming . The sparse dialogue consists of children's whispers and is barely audible. Its word-of-mouth buzz and aesthetic bring The Blair Witch Project to mind, which is the closest film I can think of to compare it to in style and substance. I felt like I was watching a nightmare on film, its temporal dream logic heightening the growing sense of unease.

While there are plenty of horror films that place children in danger, none have affected me the same way as this. The minimalist, found footage aesthetic make it feel like a home movie dug up after years of hiding in someone's basement (I felt like Ethan Hawke from Sinister as he watched the unsettling films discovered in his attic). This feeling is only heightened by the performances, or lack thereof, of the children. They speak softly and infrequently, noticeably disquieted by their circumstances. What do they do when they awake to their father missing? They go downstairs, sit in front of the TV and watch cartoons, waiting for an adult to help them.

YMMV certainly. The low budget is apparent, not just because of the minimal aesthetics but also the special effects have a kind of low-grade YouTube quality to them. Still, Ball does a lot with a little and I'll be interested to see the reactions of others here to it.

I haven't seen this film yet, but I did just see his short, Heck which is essentially a shorter version of this from my limited understanding. Regarding your spoiler,

SpoilerShow

how can this be "found footage" if this film is rooted in the supernatural? Also in Heck, it's slightly different as it appears the mother and child are in hell. Do you know if that film is operating in a loop, or are we just getting a slice of life in hell? In Skinamarink, what indicates that it is a loop? Also, with the mutilation and disfigurement, is this a gory film? Heck is not gory. It appears that the director when given the chance to expand Heck into a feature he has gone all out and ratcheted up the grotesque.

[Murdoch]

It can feel primal, can make you feel powerless, can get undeniably creepy. But I found myself either shocked out of its vibe -- it stumbles whenever it tries to make anything happen, those jump scares are desperate -- or zoning out of it and using a lot of the dead time to think instead of feel. I get the Blair Witch comparisons, but there' may be a difference in the real-time mundane or bursts of frantic panic and staring at public domain cartoons for what felt like long, long random stretches. Perhaps a more evident sense of control would have made me feel more controlled. But I very much respect what it was doing, and am impressed this wound up in multiplexes when it could just have easily been an installation you could wander in and out of.

I agree with you. I think, for all the unease I felt, there is a lack of control to it and I think it needed a lot more editing to trim the excess (100 minutes and about 80 percent consists of shots of the same dark hallways or rooms). Ball has a clear vision to show but my friend and I felt it would function better as a short than a lengthy feature (for me anything over 90 minutes is lengthy these days).

Re: aox

SpoilerShow

I say "found footage" because it has a grainy, unrefined home movie quality to it. However, it likely is not actual found footage within the film's universe since it's missing some of the trademarks of the subgenre - namely, none of the characters at any point pick up a camera and film.

I have not seen Heck, but there is pretty clear evidence within the text of the film of looping. About halfway through, the children watch a looping cartoon short of a rabbit making himself disappear (there are several cartoon shorts shown in the film, all of them replicating something happening to the characters). Later in the film, the disembodied voice says he is able to make anything happen (I'm paraphrasing). Then, toward the end, there's the most disturbing scene of the film - a child screams, blood splashes on the ceiling, and then the blood disappears, then again a child's scream is heard, then the same exact pattern of blood appears on the ceiling and disappears again.

However, this film is not really gory either, except for a few shots of blood on the walls. The violence is implied. For example, at one point, the disembodied voice tells one child to put a knife in his eye, you then hear the child crying, and the film cuts to a splash of blood on a mirror.

There are many theories, but it's evident that this voice, whether it's a demon or some other supernatural figure, has the power to control the children's actions and can alter reality - evidenced by several things such as the windows and doors disappearing, one child's eyes and mouth disappearing, and how it's able to teleport one child from one room to another.

[dadaistnun]

Very much a film you need to be in the mood for in order to get on its wavelength. I fell asleep on my first two (admittedly late night) attempts. Third time was the charm, and I found it upsetting and very frightening. The (two?) jump scares may be cheap, but they did their job.

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Among the creepiest moments for me: the knife, the 911 call, the seeming omniscience of the whispering voice, the visit upstairs to the mother, and that final shot of an undistinguished face in the darkness.

I watched this via the leaked version that was circulating. In addition to the burned-in subtitles for some (but not all) of the quiet dialogue, I had the closed captioning turned on, which gives some specificity to certain sound effects; I can’t recall them all, but a disturbing sound near the end of the scene with the mother is captioned as “bone cracking” which removes some ambiguity (what?) while introducing another (who?).

[The Curious Sofa]

This is basically an "analog horror" video, the type of which you find on various youtube channels, stretched to feature length. I suppose the difference is that ideally you get to experience this in a darkened theatre rather than on a smart phone but I have to admit that at 100 minutes it wore my patience thin.

I wonder whether the buzz around Skinamarink contributed to the creepypasta The Backrooms now being adapted into a feature film by A24. The most notable thing about that is that it will be directed by the 17 year old who turned it into a video short. Seems like "liminal spaces" is where it's at in horror now.

https://deadline.com/2023/02/the-backro ... 235249413/

[colinr0380]

If you don't mind major spoilers Wendigoon has done a video exploring the film and theories around its meaning, as well as a livestream going through Kyle Edward Ball's other short films on his YouTube channel. Wendigoon may be the best placed YouTuber to have looked at this film, given they have a bit of interest in religious topics and spent a few videos going through the work of Dante in other videos on their channel.

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I kind of see the film as similarly themed to that P.T. style game Visage (NSFW), or the purgatory the wife who committed suicide is found in (and has to be abandoned to) in What Dreams May Come. Some horrible accident occurs (the child falling down the stairs at the opening, whether accidentally or otherwise) and then they wake up presumably post-death inside their home that they can never leave. Because the house was their entire world that is what the torment of purgatory becomes. The short film Heck is much more (perhaps too) blunt about the child having cancer and either dying from that disease or more likely having been killed by the mother, hence them both ending up in a purgatory of being trapped together through those actions. Skinamarink seems more ambiguous about whether the parents (or more specifically the mother) abused and then murdered their children (the presence of both a brother and sister in this film suggests more pointedly that it was not just a one-off accident) or if the mother perhaps consciously sacrificed their unwitting children to some kind of demonic force in an (unsuccessful?) attempt to escape from that fate themselves.

I do particularly like just how much the film plays on that childhood fear of the dark, and of familiar rooms suddenly becoming scary and off limits as soon as the lights are turned off, narrowing down further and further to small lit areas of rooms as a circle of supposed safety, such as a bed or a couch, but which cannot actually provide tangible escape, just a temporary distraction from issues playing out around them that they have no ability to influence. Instead the children just play with their Legos and hope that they will not be focused on and targeted by whatever force is stalking them. But as with Heck, it involves a slow and painful realisation that they were already lost long before and we are just watching souls replaying their torment via the slow, stuttering hesitant pulls towards the inevitable death, which once we get there just replays over and over ceaselessly without catharsis from that finality, just an infinite loop of that terminal moment as the cat and mouse games to get there stop and we flatline at the spray of blood splattering across the wainscotting of the ceiling of the now topsy-turvy walls. That makes that stuttering nature of the film feel like not a move towards revelation, but a slow unwilling slide towards an even greater terror. The terror of knowing, but being unable to do anything to change it.

Whether there actually is a demon or just the mother visualised as the demon in Purgatory, and the reasons behind why the children and their mother ended up there is not particularly needed - those are the hazy and vague, half-understood adult motivations that are entirely stripped away from the children kept in the dark as to why their environment that should be safe is suddenly so full of dark and threatening corners.

It's kind of the childhood horror-themed Jeanne Dielman in that sense (or the We Need To Talk About Kevin from the child's perspective back on the mother?). And may be the film I would most advise any parent not to let their children see, not because of its violent content but because it so relentlessly and pitilessly focuses on specific to children terrors.

[Murdoch]

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Some horrible accident occurs (the child falling down the stairs at the opening, whether accidentally or otherwise) and then they wake up presumably post-death inside their home that they can never leave. Because the house was their entire world that is what the torment of purgatory becomes.

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I tend to take a more literal approach to films than most. To me, I took the opening at face value - the boy fell down the stairs and survived, which to me makes what follows all the more horrifying. I've seen the theory tossed around that the demon or what-have-you caused the boy to trip, an early demonstration of it sadistically toying with the children.

I think the 911 call evidences the children are still alive after Kevin falls down the stairs. Kevin speaks to a 911 operator after he stabs himself, the operator seems to be the real deal and not some manipulation from the supernatural force - the conversation plays out like an adult trying to get information from a child. The operator attempts to help, but Kevin is too vague and infantile to give the operator any clear direction. It plays out how I would expect an emergency call from a child to go and I didn't get the sense Kevin was reaching out from beyond the grave or that the call was some manifestation of Kevin's psyche (it seemed far too realistic for a 4 year old to have come up with)

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Skinamarink seems more ambiguous about whether the parents (or more specifically the mother) abused and then murdered their children (the presence of both a brother and sister in this film suggests more pointedly that it was not just a one-off accident) or if the mother perhaps consciously sacrificed their unwitting children to some kind of demonic force in an (unsuccessful?) attempt to escape from that fate themselves.

SpoilerShow

That's an interesting interpretation. I didn't get the sense that the children were murdered by their parent(s). I interpreted that the mother left their father and them and that he'd either neglected his parental responsibilities after the split or he followed the mother's lead and left, abandoning them. Because of that, these children are left to their own devices, unprotected and unsupervised, and confronted with a manifestation of every child's fears. Kevin at one point asks Kaylee where their father is, and then says "maybe he went with mom." Kaylee says she doesn't want to talk about their mother, hinting that she's upset with her from something from before they woke up. If the children are dead (which I don't think they are, and even after they're slaughtered by the demon I think they still exist in some state in between life and death), I wouldn't say it was from murder but instead from malnutrition or some other incidental harm stemming from their parents' negligence in abandoning them.

[Kracker]

"Skinamarink will scare you if you've ever been a child"

Whether you liked it or not, which seems to depend on whether it resonates with your own experiences as a child, it certainly did mine, you have to applaud that this is essentially the first full-length creepypasta film and that it showed how it is done well. I found it appropriate that its an exercise in minimalism and subtlety, which seems to be this director's style; all of his stuff is all about creating cozy, nostalgic but dreadful atmosphere. Whether its more than a coincidence that its release and buzz preceded the announcement of A24 producing a Backrooms movie, i figured a Backrooms movie was extremely inevitable due to its huge cult following that's stronger than the "Bitesize Nightmares" that Skinamarink, which was crowdfunded, is based off of. It was the smart move for someone to jump on it.

When it comes to the interpretation I prefer the simple face value approach that these kids are trapped in their cozy home with a malevolent poltergeist that is responsible for everything, including Kevin's fall and I think this aligns with the director's theme of making childhood fears and dread real, emphasized by all the very strict child POV shots (complete with the "sitting too close to the TV"). Because none of these metaphor interpretations I've seen aren't nearly as terrifying. The "i don't want to talk about Mom" line did raise questions but I read that the director clarified that the dad is raising the two kids alone in the house (so Wendigoon was correct on that).

[Johnny8204]

I know a number of people have compared this to Paranormal Activity or The Blair Witch Project but to me this was basically a younger version of Megan is Missing (2011). I wish the film had a tighter narration...it felt like it was too much of a gimmick. They could have done more with the story and made it a bit more cohesive it was almost ambiguous for the sake ambiguous.

[Kracker]

yeah i hate the Paranormal Activity/The Blair Witch Project comparison since this isn't some found footage with dramatic scares, its just going for mood and nostalgia, and being cozy but creepy and I guess some word of mouth is selling it different.

[barryconvex]

It's subject matter and approach are totally different but the sense of creeping dread reminded me a lot of the first Paranormal Activity. Both films are using the moviegoer's expectations against them, counterintuitive static shots that surely must soon give way to some unspeakable horror. This really worked for me, I was scared shitless, barely able to keep from fast forwarding through some of the tense middle sections. The distorted demon voice, the kids whispering and that fucking cartoon...

[John Cope]

Absolutely brilliant and extraordinary. One of the best new films I've seen in a very long time. Really, I can't say enough good things about this. I'm inclined at the moment to regard it as essentially a perfect film.

What can we say about this? Well, it's like a feature length ASMR video. There is indeed little else like it but a few parallels come to mind. Obviously director Ball owes a debt to experimental cinema pioneers but I especially see a similarity to Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space, especially in its curdled perversity, the way that the very medium of the film itself is included in the experientiality of it, fraying and coming undone, until it too becomes just as much of a threat to us as what it depicts; it's relentless and there is no escape then as the film as a film is a participant in what assaults us--that claustrophobic confinement, partially a product of the film grain/film stock aesthetic, is present here too as a kind of ambient textural experiment. This has reminded many of Lynch and that's understandable but I think it's far more remote than his work generally tends to be (Lynch is positively flamboyant by comparison); I think it's far closer to someone like Nina Menkes; indeed, I can't think of anyone else who might approach this idea with this level of patient observation (maybe Fear X era Refn or the central section in Beyond the Black Rainbow). And, in perhaps the most perverse parallel of all, there is some resemblance here to infamous Bad Movie After Last Season simply in the ceaselessly dislocating and disquieting concentration upon odd people-less angles on corners of rooms and inanimate objects, a style that can seem unjustified and unjustifiable. Here though at least I think the justification for it is exactly as a study in the basic elements of an environment, those elements that make up the essential space around us that we take for granted but that can conspire against us in a scenario of horror or trauma. And make no mistake, there is a deep horror here, a primal fear even, that such a concentration and subsequent deconstruction taps into, in part because all that focus only emphasizes its constructed nature and inherent flimsiness then as a bulwark against the unknown or unknowable. More than this though the film's accomplishment is to gradually defamiliarize us with what we think we know so well that we do take it for granted (and that certainly includes the nuclear family as well); its fragility is then at the forefront.

It's also interesting here that the removal of the windows and doors in the home and the absence of exterior imagery contributes to this disassociation, casting all into timelessness despite (or to spite) the initial 1995 date which seems in retrospect like a desperate effort to anchor it on something stable (this era specificity is shaken loose early on anyway in the emphasis on cartoons from an all together earlier era). We float into the void along with the few characters who remain and who were only ever glimpsed ghost like presences themselves; this is another detail to support the idea of a purely spectral sort of state or field from the beginning and here I don't mean that they are literally ghosts in the most thunderingly obvious way but that human phenomenology as know it is cast as essentially illusory or phantasmical. The fact that we are left only with the youngest child is instructive too. He's obviously not capable of handling whatever this is but who would be and I think that's the point. The film cuts directly then to a subconscious wavelength, suggesting not so much that it may be the only way to understand what is going on but rather simply that this is the state or level that this is on.

Just as the film makes everything familiar alien to us, that particular alienness is aligned finally with the larger idea of the alien. I can think of no better attempt to slowly acclimate us to that then this and that alone justifies the length (a sticking point for many apparently). There was never a moment in this that I thought was wasted or unnecessary or drawn out unduly; it's all at the service of that gradual acclimation. And that may be overall where it's best to leave this assessment. Ball's control over his medium is total and mirrors the film's concentration upon the house as controlled environment. He may owe a debt to the Backroom liminal spaces craze but the film version of that (even while it's being made, encouragingly enough, by its own creator) may be in debt to Ball's successful reception for making its own production a viable possibility at all (and it will be very remarkable indeed if it manages to match his masterful craft, so incisive and far reaching).

[spectre]

You certainly paint a compelling picture, JC! Thanks for the great review.

Not sure if or when I'll actually get the chance to see this on the big screen – I missed its brief Australian theatrical run – but is it fair to assume you need to see this in a cinema if possible? I'm sure I can find a way to watch it at home, but get the feeling that it's a film that would be particularly vulnerable to the breaks in immersion that inevitably come with home viewing.