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Skinamarink
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Acorn Media Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (16th July 2023). |
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The Film
 1995: Young Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) live in fear of the darkness within their home at night. After Kevin sleepwalks and falls down the stairs, the two children begin to suspect that there is something else living with them; something that even their parents (Ross Paul and Jaime Hill) cannot, or will not, protect them from. It first makes its appearance known with footsteps and clattering. It plays with their toys. It makes objects, furniture, and even doors and windows disappear at will. It makes their parents vanish as well. It then makes itself known through a voice that first beckons them down dark corridors and into dark rooms to horrific sites, and then it starts telling them to do things. When they refuse, it punishes them. In spite of a running time nearing two hours, there is very little to Skinamarink, the feature-length reworking of director Kyle Edward Ball's YouTube horror long-form short Heck; both of which embody a new horror trend known as "lo-fi horror" of which the found footage sub-genre is only a single aspect. Minimalist to the extreme with sustained takes lit only in the eerie analog blue of a CRT televisions screen and "scored" with music, sounds, and dialogue from public domain cartoons the looping of which may symbolize the cyclical experience of the children Skinamarink may bore a lot of viewers since "nothing happens" for most of the running time with the reviewer's own attention perked up for ten minutes seventy minutes in and then again in the last ten minutes; however, it does conjure (or trigger) certain memories of being awake at night as a child when the darkness made the familiar unfamiliar. Corridors seemed longer than before, open doorways seemed like black holes, light switches and handholds seemed to be just off from where they should be, night sounds were distorted by the drone of the heater or air conditioner, and groggy voices seemed alien. Ball offers little on which to hang an interpretation; as such, some of the above synopsis could be projection. Just as it seems to simple to attribute the film's "monstrous" happenings to the supernatural, it seems reductive to interpret it as an allegory for child abuse. While that may not be Ball's intention indeed, he may just indeed be trying to recapture and convey a feeling of childhood terror rather than anything concrete the child abuse interpretation is stimulating, suggesting a reason for the oblique angles that keep voices and other persons just out of range like the point-of-view of someone who knows better than to make eye contact, why neither parent offers Kevin the comfort of eye contact when he ventures into their room at night (the father a voice under the comforter and the mother sitting on the bed face averted), with even the unfamiliar voice a disassociation that is particularly terrifying when it tells them to do things harmful to themselves. Whether watching the film with SDH subtitles or not, certain lines of dialogue are captioned onscreen seemingly not because they may be unintelligible but as commands that beckon the children into places that amplify their terror even without concrete sights and sounds. While there are definitely some sights of moving objects that appear to happen directly in front of the children's eyes, some of the other shots of toys or objects moving or scattered by jump cuts may actually be unacknowledged time jumps leading up to the climactic "572 days" caption that suggests that if the child abuse interpretation holds true then Skinamarink is not told from the perspective of a child experiencing an awakening to their situation but that of one who obeys rather than question and seeks comfort in what is familiar no matter how terrifying; of course, on the other hand, it may all be deliberate trolling by the director courting the Shudder, A24, and Blumhouse "elevated horror" crowd. 
Video
Shot digitally on the Sony FX6 with minimal lighting and the ISO pushed into the extremes where noise is introduced and further exacerbated in the grade Skinamarink can look more "digital" than "analog" as much due to the technology as some of the unacknowledged anachronisms that seem to plague the memories of some filmmakers attempting to go retro in the digital realm in the 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.40:1 presentation, but the poor look of the film on disc is true to the film's aesthetic and bound to frustrate those looking for something slick from a modern horror film. 
Audio
Although the audio track is DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, that is the delivery format and the mix itself is very front- and center-oriented, not quite mono but even the audio jump scares are not particularly directional. Optional English SDH, French, and Spanish subtitles are included suggesting that this is a direct port of the U.S. release like most of Acorn's other Shudder titles but the onscreen captions remain in English (with French or Spanish appearing at the top of the screen for these), although Ball mentions on the commentary that he had to prepare a version without the captions burnt-in for international sales. 
Extras
The sole extra is an audio commentary by writer/director/editor Kyle Edward Ball and cinematographer Jamie McRae in which Ball deliberately withholds interpretation while discussing critical, festival, and even viral responses to the film with a tone that may be prickly or just Canadian sardonic wit and focuses more on the actual shoot which took place in his parents' home, dιcor and furniture that was there and what they had to add and remove, sourcing public domain cartoons, only using a handful of sounds recorded on the set with the rest of the sound mix composed of royalty free foley effects, recording all of the dialogue in post, sometimes resorting to using still images since one of the child actors could not keep still for long amounts of time (the combination of video noise and added digital grain giving life to these shots), using his own voice and distorting it in post for the female 911 operator, and how the artefacting of illegally-obtained streams of the film may have caused some of the social media reactors to see or read things into the indistinct images that were not there (as well as the opposite as they note that one person offering an interpretation did not realize the father was present onscreen in the bedroom scene).  The disc does not include the film's trailer, which his unfortunate since it was very instrumental in drumming up viral interest in the film.
Overall
Whether an allegory for child abuse, an attempt to evoke a feeling of childhood terror of the unknown, or just deliberate trolling for the "elevated horror crowd", Skinamarink may just as easily stimulate as frustrate even the most seasoned horror viewer.
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