Review: SKINAMARINK

A series of mostly static shots of a house at night. The light is either referred or flooding from tv screens or torches. The image is murky with noisy grain preventing clarity. Soon we hear the voices of children, Kaylee and Kevin, sometimes so muffled they need subtitles, sometimes clear and close. They are trying to make sense of waking up in this house where there are no doors to the outside and no windows. The sense that something grave and very wrong has taken place is all we have and it swells.

This film plays on fear of the dark, the physical darkness of a house at night and the dark of unknowing. It is compounded by the point of view of the two children as they are variously static with fear or follow the instructions they can hear that might be parental or something more forbidding. 

That's what you get for one hundred minutes. There are some moments of relief when we catch a glimpse of the children's faces or watch the antique cartoons on screen but the message on the tin is clear from the first few minutes of static shot after static shot of different rooms.

This is a difficult film to describe. It made me think immediately of why The Forbidden Files or The Blair Witch Project were so effective when new as they presented scenarios without apparent manipulation. The found footage subgenre of horror that slowly rose from the latter example built, at its best, on the principle of limited exposure. What the committed viewer of any good found footage film will know is that their own imaginative completion of what they cannot see is worse than the most sophisticated digital effects. I find it oddly gratifying that the advent of avenues like YouTube have provided such a welcoming home to this approach.

Skinamarink does not play like a found footage movie, though. To reinforce the base dread of the point of view of scared children the film takes on more of a VR walk-through. A few years back, as part of a pre-order deal, I received a scaled down version of an Occulus headset and grabbed a few affordable horror VRs. As a vulnerably empathic person I couldn't make my way through the terrifying Afflicted: The Manor (a friend of mine didn't skip a pulse beat when he tried it) and the heavily uneasy Asian Horror style School. The latter was more of a game where the player had to perform tasks and progress through a scenario but the atmosphere alone and the immersion had me tearing the headset off. If Skinamarink was a VR game rather than a movie it would have the same effect.

That is why a cinema viewing is preferable to a playthrough in the home. Even at night, alone, with the lights out, the deliberate pace and vagueness of the images would not have the same effect when a pause button was to hand. The reason the film is not kept to a short but extended beyond its apparent material is precisely because it needs to immerse each member of even the fullest house alone into its breathless and weird world.

If the notion of providing your own reason to this lengthy block of experience is oppressive or too demanding then pass it by. If, on the other hand, you delight in projecting your own creativity on to the basic materials (like the regularly depicted messes of lego bricks on the floor) this is for you, even if only as a one and done viewing. I've often said that well crafted atmosphere alone will do more for me than a well wrought conventional horror plot. Well, this was my test. I only needed to see it once but as with the likes of Martyrs, Irreversible or Salo, it's a big once.

PS - I have heard a convincing theory about this film which I'll happily discuss with anyone who sees it but will not disclose as it would only guide new viewers to a particular reading which would go against the point of the film. I encountered the notion of it after watching it.

Skinamarink is currently available on Shudder.