Skinamarink is a 2022 Canadian experimental horror film directed by Kyle Edward Ball, and potentially the most controversial horror film of the 2020s thus far. Nevertheless, what makes people have such extreme reactions to it, both positive and negative?
The basic plot of Skinamarink is deceptively simple. The movie starts with a little boy named Kevin falling down the stairs. We overhear a conversation between the father and an unknown other person, presumably Kevin’s mother. The father explains that Kevin is okay and he “didn’t even need stitches”.
After this unsettling intro, the other character introduced is Kaylie, Kevin’s sister, as she discovers that the windows, doors, and their father have disappeared. Basically, the rest of the movie is two kids in a dark house being tormented by an unseen evil.
With a fairly average score of 4.7/10 on IMBD, Skinamarink doesn’t seem like anything remarkable until you look at the breakdown of reviews and realize that there are over three thousand one-star reviews. On letterboxed, the reviews range from George, who said “I just spent an hour and 40 minutes of my life staring at furniture while people whispered…”, to Trin’s two-star review, saying they “could think of many other things I’d rather do than watch a ceiling in silence with some loud noises sporadically placed in the midst of static”, and my personal favorite, “MovieBoy”, who rated it ½ of a star and said “looking at the wall simulator 2022”. These reviews are in such shocking contrast to those left by people who enjoyed the film like “Framesofnick” who rated it 4.5 stars: “I got too scared and stopped watching.” and “Based” who rated it 5 stars and said it “freaked me out so badly I was basically begging for it to end through the last 20 minutes. What the fuck man”.
What I think makes Skinamarink so divisive is two main things. One is the unrelenting cruelty that these blameless children are facing. Even in horror films, terrible things rarely happen to blameless children, but Kevin and Kaylie are thrust into some of the most gruesome and horrific scenarios for no understandable reason. And while some people crave this senseless violence, it also turns a lot of people off from the film.
The second thing that makes or breaks the film for most people is the way it is filmed. To be honest, probably 95% of the movie is just shots of walls, a dark stairway, or across a floor littered with Duplo blocks. We barely see the kids, and when we do, they are obscured by the complete darkness of the house or painted ghostly pale by the television playing black and white cartoons. There is a frankly ridiculous amount of film grain that does add to the atmosphere, but is also very distracting. All of these things combined with a couple of cheap yet effective jump scares are enough to spawn most of the bad reviews. However, I think we need to look at Skinamarink through a different lens.
I have had a recurring nightmare for as long as I can remember where I walk into my bedroom and go to flip on the lights only for the room to remain dark. It will be impossibly dark: the kind of dark people describe to be found only in the depth of caves and the deep-sea. In this dream, I know that there is someone or something in my dark bedroom, but I just can’t see it. I know that I need to go into my room, but I can’t bear to walk into the dark with whatever is in there. This dream affects me in a similar way to Skinamarink. I think almost everyone has some kind of memory or dream like this, where they find themselves afraid in their own home, or have that unsettling moment of waking up and realizing you are the only conscious person in the house. Skinamarink is when I would creep across the hallway and crawl into my parents’ bed just so I wasn’t alone in my dark bedroom. Skinamarink is after I laid down staring at the fan on my parents’ ceiling and thinking I heard something outside the window or saw something out of the corner of my eye. Skinamarink is the pile of clothes that in the dark looks like something ominous. Skinamarink feels like the time I woke up and heard racoons fighting right outside my window. While watching this movie, my heart was racing even though within my four walls everything was still, and the unearthly sounds made every inch of my room feel unfamiliar and hostile.
The most haunting image in the entire hour and a half runtime of Skinamarink is towards the end: the children’s toys are haphazardly pilled on the ceiling beyond the reach of their little hands, and two words appear on screen. “572 days”. Kevin and Kaylie have been stuck in a hellish version of their own home for a year and a half.
I was only haunted by shadows in my parents’ room until I fell asleep or at worst until the sun rose. Piles of clothes are only monsters until you turn on the light, and racoons only fought until my dad went outside and scared them off. But Kevin and Kaylie are another year older: previously 4 and 6, now 5 and 7 years old. No birthday party or presents, just the dark house that used to be theirs.
Skinamarink is incredibly bleak; it doesn’t have a happy ending, and the sun doesn’t rise for the kids. Their dad doesn’t come home, and the lights don’t turn back on….
Kyle Edward Ball created the entirety of the film in his childhood home for a budget of $15,000 that was entirely fundraised. Maybe there are times you can tell, but overall, with what he was working with and this being his first feature length film, Edward Ball should be extremely proud of what he created, regardless of the mixed reviews.
