An immersive horror movie that demands to be seen in a theater, director Kyle Edward Ball's 'Skinamarink' drops the viewer into a disorienting exploration of a darkened house.
Reportedly shot for $15,000 — with digital cameras that Ball, cinematographer Jamie McRae and their post-production crew have tweaked to make the picture look like extremely grainy celluloid — “Skinamarink” has no plot per se. Instead, the film drops the viewer into the middle of a disorienting middle-of-the-night exploration of a darkened house, shot at odd angles.
Ball never gives the audience much more to work with than that. The dialogue is so quiet that sometimes Ball relies on subtitles to convey whatever information he feels is essential. The rest of the soundtrack is made up of ambient noise and clips of public domain cartoons on television; and even those sounds from the TV often devolve into static or get stuck on repetitive loops.
One of the reasons why “Skinamarink” has been so buzzed-about is that it was pirated and shared on the internet late last year — which is ironic, because this is one of the rare modern movies that demands to be seen in a theater, where the darkness and stillness can help it cast its spell. There is always a danger too that when a horror picture gets this much hype, people will arrive unprepared for how unusual the experience will be.
So be warned: “Skinamarink” is atypical in nearly every way. It’s not flawless. A lot of what Ball is doing here might’ve been more effective within a shorter running time; and more narrative clarity likely wouldn’t have killed the overall vibe. But the chances Ball takes pay off in a one-of-a-kind film that re-creates the sensation of being very young and essentially powerless, unable even to articulate why everything feels so … wrong.
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