[REVIEW] Skinamarink “Can we watch something happy?”

Comparisons between Kyle Edward Ball’s first feature and The Blair Witch Project feel inevitable (and almost required). Both succeed by forcing you into the mindset of the films’ central characters, making you feel compelled to peer into dark corners, looking for frights. Here we’ve abandoned even the comfort of the found footage genre, existing somewhere between that and straight-played fiction. Skinamarink is, literally, about spaces between spaces as siblings Kaylee and Kevin explore their new nightmare reality. They’ve woken up in a version of their home with no doors or windows, where old cartoons exclusively play on the television, and voices beckon from upstairs. At first, the voices belong to their parents, but as the children’s memories of their old life slip away, so do the ghostly parental apparitions, replaced by something more sinister and obscure.

Skinamarink isn’t just an exploration of the spaces between memories physically and thematically, it’s also a truly stunning example of architectural horror. There’s another comparison to be drawn between one of my favorite horror movies, especially due to how both films use architecture. In Lindsay Hallam’s book Devil’s Advocates: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Hallam details how the ceiling fan that hangs on the ceiling between the married Palmers’ bedroom and that of their daughter becomes almost a witness to the transgressive abuse Leland inflicts on Laura, changing it from “being seemingly innocuous to infused with meaning and menace” (Hallam 49). While infusing the innocuous with meaning/menace permeates throughout Skinamarink, one bit of horror architecture that stood out to me was a light affixed to the floor beneath the parents' bedroom. What appears the first time we see it as just another bit of classic American home design begins to represent something darker. We often are looking up at it to hear a commotion happening on the second level of the home, as if from the perspective of children. Hearing violence through this ceiling/floor at first seems to be comforting as if it shields Kaylee and Kevin from the horror but then it shifts into a barrier, forcing the siblings to separate and making them completely isolated in their new environment. All the while, the light watches unchanging, uncaring.

What makes this one of the best horror films of the decade isn’t just how it works cerebrally. There is an absolute deep-felt terror to this world, one made deeper by its almost completely unseen child protagonists. This allows, or forces, the viewer to map their childhood selves onto these characters and the hellscape they’re experiencing. The scariest sequence in the movie, where Kaylee is told by her father’s voice to look under her parent’s bed, doesn’t have a big fright or a jumpscare. It’s simply intensely suspenseful and forces you to peer into the darkness as Kaylee does, convinced there will be something there to terrify you. The film taps into the discomfort possibly experienced as a child when asked to do something you shouldn’t by an adult. It rests in the pit of your stomach, torturing you with the thought that this isn’t right but you don’t have the power to say so.

Skinamarink is a hypnotic film that almost lulls you to sleep, but more so akin to how a fairy tale trickster would, leaving you unaware of where you’ll wake up or in what condition. It’s a film where you get intimately familiar with a character's footsteps or the layout of a home, at first to distinguish who is going where, but then as the film shifts, what was familiar becomes sinisterly unknown, and it can feel impossible and earth-shattering. Familiar concepts like building design and childhood nostalgia become weaponized into creatures lurking in the dark. Perhaps its weakest moments are its most literal ones, where the “monster”, so to speak, has to give even the slightest bit of context to the events. I found myself wondering if perhaps the film would’ve been stronger with no creature, no confirmed other presence in the space with these two children. But on the other hand, perhaps I would’ve been disappointed by the lack of a reveal, and this one is hardly designed to be crowd-pleasing. Skinamarink feels like an obscure object, like one should have to be shuffled into a dark room in the back of a museum to be able to watch it. I am so glad that is not the case.