Who’s Afraid of ‘Skinamarink’?

Roughly five to ten minutes into Skinamarink, you hear a father on the phone explaining that his son bumped his head falling down the stairs. But he’s fine. Everything is going to be okay. As it turns out, everything is not going to be okay.

Writer-director Kyle Edward Ball crowd-sourced stories of people’s childhood nightmares and found that many of them were the same. They were in a house alone. Their parents were missing. There was a monster in the house. And so it goes with Skinamarink, which makes the movie sound way more accessible than it will be for most audiences. It’s important to know that it’s a very, very, very slow movie. Skinamarink and Blair Witch Project are bound to draw comparisons. They’re both ultra-low budget and can be described as experimental.

But Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity – another film that will draw inevitable comparisons to Skinamarink – are more narratively conventional. For long periods during Skinamarink, the audience sees shots of grainy darkness suddenly interrupted by the top corner of a doorframe opening, a nightlight replugged into its socket, or a cordless phone charger while hearing the slow beeping of its buttons. And when I say long periods, I mean minutes at a time. The screening I attended was so quiet that the woman next to me kept taking one piece of popcorn at a time and sucking on it like a lozenge. She seemed nice.

As far as the set-up, it’s 1995 and we’re in a house with four-year-old Kevin and his six-year-old sister Kaylee. Most of what we see is supposedly through their eyes. After a sleepwalking incident, Kevin and Kaylee awake in the middle of the night to find their parents missing. They decide to sleep downstairs, comforting themselves with legitimately disturbing old cartoons. (If you have the chance to see this at an Alamo Drafthouse, the cartoons are part of the pre-show.) They start to hear noises and something that’s not their parents might be talking to them. Toilets and windows disappear, chairs and toys start to appear on ceilings, and everything begins to feel a bit like a nightmare oozing its way out of a dark walk on little feet through a spooky house. To tell more would give away the eventual reveals and viewers have to wait what feels like a long, long time for those.

Skinamarink is difficult to review because people who will like it will really, really love it. For many conventional moviegoers, it’s definitely not going to push the same buttons as something like Smile or Scream. It’s Blair Witch Project for people who are into David Lynch’s Inland Empire or Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Which is not to say that one needs to have seen or enjoyed either of those films to get Skinamarink. You just need to be well-caffeinated and patient. Ball sets out what he means to do by putting the audience in the eyes of scared children afraid to move quickly through darkness. The wonky angles, grainy filmstock, and incredibly effective use of sound all work to take the audience there. But like many nightmares, it sometimes feels like it’s been going on forever.