Skinamarink (Movie Review)

Skinamarink came out in early January and it’s already likely to be this year’s weirdest and most unlikely movie to play in multiplexes. Even the backstory behind this $15,000 movie getting a wide release is bizarre: after screening at a film festival, a copy of the film was leaked and subsequently shared and hyped on TikTok and other social media sites, which built enough buzz to garner it a wide cinematic release along with whispers of it being the next Paranormal Activity or Blair Witch Project. Financially, it did fit in the tradition of its microbudget predecessors, earning $1.5 million as of this review. In terms of audience reactions, it’s become a rorschach test of a movie, with anecdotes of mass walkouts of bored and/or angry audiences in theaters existing alongside hyperbolic reviews praising it as one of the most profoundly terrifying movies ever made.

So what is Skinamarink about? In terms of plot and characters, not a lot. It concerns two children left alone in a house after the inexplicable disappearance of their parents, followed by the doors and windows (and for some reason, the toilet). Now trapped inside the house, the children are taunted and prompted by a mysterious entity as 100-year-old public domain cartoons blare away on the omnipresent television. The premise might sound like a bog standard haunted house movie, but it’s the presentation where things get weird. Dark corners are shot from the low angle a five-year-old might perceive them. The faces of characters are never depicted, we only see skittering feet or a vague and shadowy torso. Maddeningly long shots hold on a pile of lego or a tv screen as something happens just offscreen that we can only guess at by what we hear. The whole thing is further obscured by a thick smear of white noise on the soundtrack and digital film grain that force the viewer to lean in to try to figure out what they’re seeing or hearing. If you remember those early youtube videos that would trick people into looking very closely at a rocking chair only for a shrieking demon to pop up with a jump scare, Skinamarink plays the same game in its most effective moments.

Unfortunately, those effective moments are few and far between. A jump-scare-fest would probably be incredibly annoying, but the pervasive aura of dread that Skinamarink intends to build is by no means guaranteed to be effective for everyone. It does seem that some people can deeply engage with the movie and be lulled into an almost hypnotic state of anticipation which makes the movie deeply terrifying for them. If you can’t lock into the movie like that, though, you’re quite likely to just feel an intense and pervasive boredom. Not much happens in the film. There’s no soundtrack, just the aforementioned auditory fuzz and irritating loops of public domain cartoons. It’s hard to say what the proper length that Skinamarink should be is (a 20 minute short seems like the sweet spot, but Skinamarink is already a feature length take on a short called Heck that director Kyle Edward Bell made two years ago), but at 100 minutes, it strains to prevent the anticipatory dread from decaying into annoyance and fatigue.

Skinamarink has the odd distinction of simultaneously being both an unequivocal success and a victim of its own success. Somehow an mostly non-narrative experimental horror movie broke through to the point that many people who would otherwise never watch a movie like this are seeing it at their local multiplex. Predictably, many of them hate it. The fact is that it’s not often that a microbudget horror movie can become a viral success on this scale and when a movie that would probably be more at home playing in an art installation than a mall cineplex becomes a genuine sensation, horror fans should be thrilled because that is a major win for the genre and will quite likely pave the way for another microbudget breakthrough that might be more palatable. So if you love horror, but didn’t love Skinamarink, my advice is to not disparage the movie or the director or the people it did work for, just accept that it wasn’t for you, shrug it off. and be happy that your beloved genre picked up this wild and unexpected W out of nowhere.