Skinamarink and the dull horror of watching paint dry

The scariest thing about it is that you'll never get that time back

I was a nervous kid when I was little. Life was a parade of uncertainty and without a foundation of experience with which to compare everything against, without the jaded desensitization of adulthood, everything was scary to me. But I loved monster movies and the prospect of a horror flick. I have a clear memory of my dad taking me to see The Empire Strikes Back for the second time at a movie theater that was also showing Friday the 13th. I was way too little to have seen it and I didn’t even mention my interest at the time, since the poster is very evocative and screams forbidden fruit to a four year old, but I knew what sort of movie it was just by looking at it and I wanted in on it. Even at that age I instinctively knew that horror movies were a vehicle for me to experience the daily fear that I lived with at arm’s length.

Now I’m an adult with kids of my own and I struggle with that same fear in the second person. Am I breaking the cycles that created such a frightened little boy back in the day? Am I a better parent to my kids than my parents were to me? I really have no way of knowing for sure and it occasionally freaks me out in the same primal way that everything used to freak me out when I was four.

With this sort of anxiety in mind, you’d have thought that a movie like Skinamarink would have zeroed in on those anxieties and held me in its icy clutches. It certainly hits those notes and I love a low budget movie that does a lot with only a little bit of money but man alive, was this a tedious experience. Skinamarink is a movie that sets out to win you over with its central premise and then does everything in its power to force you to shed any goodwill or interest you may have built up from the start.

Skinamarink comes out of the corner swinging. It’s interesting to look at. Concerning the fate of a pair of very young children in a house by themselves, camera angles are low and the experience of being in the house brings you down to a child’s height and, for all my complaints about the movie, it’s a solid technique for placing the viewer in the shoes of those kids and evoking the same weird experience with fear that you had as a child. A dark house in the middle of the night can be a frightening thing at that age. Open doors yawn into silent darkness. The house shifts on its foundation, groaning and settling. It very much has the potential to feel like a monster and you’re inside it, desperately trying to remain silent, letting everyone else sleep while you explore. I used to do this, as I’m sure lots of kids did. I’d either stay up extremely late or get up extremely early, having the house to myself while everyone else slept, but exploring in silence since interruption would put a quick end to the adventure. But in those silent hours the excitement is offset by the uncanny spookiness of a silent house. It is a deeply unsettling experience upon reflection. This seems to be a deliberate filmmaking decision by the movie’s director, Kyle Ball, and it is a wild way to pull you in.

If Skinamarink has anything approaching a story to speak of, it concerns the fate of brother and sister, Kevin and Kaylee, who find themselves alone in the house following an accident where Kevin falls down the steps while sleepwalking. The next day they find themselves alone in the house. Their father has disappeared along with the doors and windows leading out. And a voice in the darkened house is calling to them.

As a parent, it’s not hard to find your anxiety ratcheted up to the highest it’s ever been, short of a real-life crisis involving your actual children. Being that you never actually get a good look at Kevin or Kaylee and that their whispered voices both portray children far too young to be left on their own, you instinctively want to leap through the screen and rescue them since they could be a stand-in for your own kids or kids close to you in some other manner. Were this a twenty or thirty minute short film it would have left a solid scar on my psyche. Children in peril will do that to you, especially kids so young that they struggle to pronounce their R’s and L’s. They make do in the early moments of the film, wondering where dad went, trying to call someone, trying to call 911, before settling in for the long haul as best as a six year can old determine. But then the thirty minute mark passes, then forty, then fifty minutes go by and any fear or worry you might have harbored slips away as it dawns on you that nothing has happened and that nothing is likely to happen. Ball has a handful of really great ideas and techniques that would have been perfectly at home in a short film, but being a Youtuber at heart, he desperately wants to work in the long form and insists on dragging the proceedings out to a miserable one hundred minutes, giving up, entirely on telling any sort of story by the eighty minute mark and simply focusing on long shots of dark rooms and the occasional jump scare.

That’s one hundred agonizing minutes of squinting at dark, grainy static shots, trying to make out shapes in the gloom, trying to see beyond the glare of the flickering TV screen which plays an endless run of public domain cartoons. What worked in the beginning to pull you in now feels like a cheap ploy to get your ass in the seat and hold you there by way of sunk-cost. I was desperate for something, literally anything to happen. But I stuck it out, struggling to stay with it for the purpose of this write-up and all I could think at times was that I could be doing literally anything else, actually enjoying myself instead of watching a movie with a stupid title like Skinamarink, knowing that as I wrote about it I was going to have to commit that word to the screen about a dozen times.

There’s an argument to be made that what you’re watching is an experimental movie, an art film, and in a lot of ways it definitely plays with wild, unconventional techniques which objectively work, as stated above. Ball has some great ideas for making an unconventional horror movie but as the movie crosses the metaphorical Rubicon, it turns out that half-baked art film ideas is just about all that it has going for it. Skinamarink shifts expectations by making the house the main character in the story, which is a fascinating proposition, explored in other movies but never committed to quite like this. But problems arise in that it’s also weaving a fantastical mystery. It’s more than a story about two kids, magically rendered alone in the house, with no escape. There’s peril and a monster moving about in the shadows, but the monster remains completely unseen and unknown, which is a problem. You’re either Man With A Movie Camera or you’re The Amityville Horror. You have to decide, one way or the other, to simply play with motion pictures as an artistic medium or you tell a haunting story. You can blend both approaches but your story still has to have an arc, the mystery has to have at least some sort of resolution to it, even if the resolution is more mystery. Leaving your audience also free to fill in the gaps is fair game as well but Skinamarink doesn’t even give you enough to do that. Effective mystery needs to grow out of a firm foundation of relatable elements that tie together into a broader tapestry even if they’re simply symbolic. By the end of the movie Ball is out of ideas, burning frames on a slow long-zoom of an upside-down hallway covered in Legos and a jump scare involving a toy telephone that would be right at home in one of those “gone wrong at 3am” Youtube clickbait videos. You get the feeling that he came in with about an hour of material to work with and filled the rest like a college paper coming in under the word count.

The wall of reviews for Skinamarink on Shudder is a baffling affair, leading me to wonder if we’d seen the same movie or if those excited fans had even watched the entire movie as anger consumed me when THE END mercifully flashed across the screen and I realized that there was no payoff. It’s simply an experience that speaks to the filmmaker’s inexperience and you’re the victim.

Back in the 90’s when more and more feature films were hitting the market, directed by people whose only experience in filmmaking up to that point was music videos or advertisements there was a collective concern among film fans that the overall quality of new movies would decline. It’s nothing more than snobby critique as plenty of filmmakers from before came in to features from the short form. We have ads and music videos to thank for bringing us Ridley Scott and David Fincher, but a lot of these guys came in with loud first-features that put their growing pains on full public display as they just couldn’t help themselves but hit the audience with vast washes of style-over-substance and rapid-fire editing. Many found their way. Some didn’t and crawled back to MTV. And now as we see Youtube producers moving into feature film production, we’re seeing the same plague come with them and the same snobby critique by way of this scathing oped. Ball brings with him some fucking great ideas and namedropped a bunch of high-falutin’ arty filmmakers when talking to Fango, but when presented on screen it looks like he just took some of their best moves and deployed them in his own feature like toys, also forgetting that most of those artists worked primarily in short film. The chorus of praise coming from outlets that really ought to know better by this point isn’t helping, either, as criticism is supposed to help sand off the rough edges and help an artist to grow but when everyone from Rue Morgue to Variety is falling all over themselves over it, it’s just going to end up reinforcing the notion that Ball did something good with Skinamarink.

He didn’t.