We are told, before anything else, that whatever this Skinamarink is, it’s happening in 1995. That seems like a specific point, 28 years ago, to ground things in, but it’s an elegant feint. Things feel like whenever your childhood might have been. The carpet looks and feels eternal, occupying countless decades, absorbing the passage of time in its shaggy carapace, and nothing in this arcane ritual of a movie is the constant that allows you to orient yourself within it. Even the occasionally subtitled dialogue is no handle to grab hold of — you are in the grip of a deep psychic experience.
At times throughout this film, I found myself squinting because I simply could not bear what could be organizing itself into existence before me, but I could not look away. There’s something hypnotic in the way writer-director Kyle Edward Ball unfolds the diaphanous menace that’s lurking at the heart of Skinamarink — a textured nightmare that takes little bits of memory and then assembles them into a pointillist collage. Truthfully, this may not even be understandable in a linear fashion. It’s more an experience you have to react to, like an allergy test.
There’s something so simple about its setup that it really sinks its claws into you: the idea of being in your home, the place where your memories and your identity are established and nurtured, but there is some other presence holding sway. Mom and Dad or whatever authority/signifier of stability you’ve made the foundation of order is nowhere to be found, and the doors and windows are gone. Children can experience the surreal, but they don’t really understand it. And this film sets up shop in some visceral place in the back of your mind that you haven’t really consciously visited in a long time, unless you’ve got a really good therapist. Or a really bad one.
In a way, the house in this film is the canvas on which your mind splatters your anxiety. It’s not a Rorschach test; it’s not abstract enough for that purpose. But it’s a singular masterpiece that I can’t shake or keep from recommending, despite knowing that there are folks who are going to hate this, or worse, who will disrupt the experience for others. (I’ve never understood that response. If you’re not feeling a film, why not just leave and find something more rewarding to take part in? There’s always a story behind the people who like disrupting films, and it’s usually a sad one.) There’s no score here. Just room tone, and the occasional bit of audio from the cartoons that the two children seek the comfort of routine in.
It feels like the map of a nightmare, or a documentary of childhood fears, and it will likely infuriate audiences who lack imagination. That’s a bad tack for me, as a critic, to take, but it’s similar to the way that there are some people for whom The Blair Witch Project is just running and yelling. There are thousands of found-footage films, and many to most of them are not special in any way. But when one of them taps into the imagination and starts extending tendrils deep into the hippocampus, like Blair Witch does, it can be terrifying like no other experience. And Skinamarink doesn’t just do that, because it taps into that part of the brain where you feel fear, but it goes back further — to before the rational adult mind gives you the words and experience to try to understand what you’re experiencing. There are fingerprints from The Navidson Record all over this, and some DNA from The Shining, and several of The Magnus Archives’ Fears, but to its credit, Skinamarink never acts like how we think a film should.
At times, the isolated angles and emphasized intersections of the suburban experience can feel more like an art installation than a traditional haunted-house narrative. But this fits — to wrestle a metaphor I’ve been working with for years to the ground — because Skinamarink is like spooky church. It is solemn, isolating, structured and constantly unfolding on the precipice of a chasm that stretches so far that you lose all sense of time and self. This is a psychological minefield, made with an incredible amount of care.
