Film Review - Skinamarink
Images courtesy of Moving Story.
Do you remember that feeling you'd get when you were a child, trying to go to the toilet but terrified of the dark hallway that led from your bedroom to the bathroom? That ominous sense that something might reach out and grab at your ankles, peer in through a window, or, perhaps most terrifying of all, might just be waiting in a room adjacent to your path? The latest horror movie to go viral on TikTok, Skinamarink, aims to recapture that awful feeling over its 100-minute runtime.
Belonging into a subgenre known as analog horror - popularised by YouTube channels such as Local 58, The Mandela Catalogue and Gemini Home Entertainment - the film features many prolonged, grainy shots of hallways, walls, and corners of rooms, accompanied by distorted, crackling audio, and very little in the way of discernible plot. The basic plot outline is more or less two children - Kevin, age 4, and Kaylee, age 6 - awake in their home to find both of their parents missing and the doors and windows vanishing, among other strange phenomena. While I've seen some metaphorical interpretations alluding to a divorce and attempts at explaining what's actually meant to be happening in the on-screen world, to me, Skinamarink isn't meant to be explained. It's a feeling, not intended to be understood but rather to evoke a certain mindset that only minutes-long shots of static-filled darkness can.
For some that feeling might be an incredible amount of tension, for others, it might just be sleepiness. It's one of the few horror movies where I can honestly agree with its detractors despite liking it myself. It's slow, it's boring, it's tedious to the point of torture… but it's also doing something that I honestly can't say I've seen before in a feature film. For as long as the film spends doing not much outside from asserting its style, it does absolutely make its jumpscares so much more effective. As cheap as the formula of "loud sound + sudden visual cue = scary" generally is, when the rest of the film is so gradual, it magnifies that small handful of jolts into something that I honestly think should come with a health warning. I may not have been on the edge of my seat for the entire ride, but by god, there's a certain scene involving a Fisher Price phone that honestly made me feel like I was in an electric chair.
While many analog horror purists have already been quick to jump, citing Skinamarink as giving a bad name (and a ridiculous to pronounce one, too) to the subgenre for how barebones it is, it's no doubt proven to be an interesting point of entry for the mainstream consciousness - its popularity seems baffling considering just how inane the actual experience of watching the film is. Finding horror in what once was familiar, and turning comfort into something more sinister, director Kyle Edward Ball has no doubt carved a niche into the market, tapping into the near-universality of simple childhood fears.
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Skinamarink screened 28th January 2023, presented by Fantastic Film Festival Australia.