Everything feels askew in the middle of the night.
That’s the driving idea behind Skinamarink, a bold feature debut from writer-director Kyle Edward Ball that literalizes nighttime discombobulation. Largely comprised of grainy, static shots offering oddly angled views of various rooms in a house—a flickering television screen or night-light offering the only illumination—the movie follows two young siblings who wake up to find their father missing. We never see either kid’s face; they’re usually framed from the knees down, their pajama-clad legs scurrying across the carpet as they share disembodied whispers or offer the occasional, haunting, “Dad?”
This visual strategy—teasing us with what might be just outside the frame—recalls one of the horror greats, The Blair Witch Project. Yet Skinamarink (the title comes from the children’s song) isn’t exactly a found-footage film in the same vein. True, the angles suggest video footage from a baby monitor that’s been knocked over, but there are also shots that are clearly from one of the kids’ points of view. Skinamarink is more like The Blair Witch Project if it had been simmered, alongside Poltergeist, in a pot of slow cinema.
TVs are omnipresent—in the bedrooms and the downstairs living room—and almost always on. Eventually, with their father nowhere to be found, the siblings camp out downstairs in front of old-fashioned cartoons. Then things start to get really weird: a window appears on a wall where it shouldn’t be; a chair hangs from the ceiling; the toilet disappears completely. Then there’s the muffled voice telling them to come upstairs…
It’s not just a childhood fear of the dark—that desperate, midnight dash from your bedroom to the bathroom down the hall—that Skinamarink explores. It’s the deeper fear of abandonment—due to divorce, death, or some other circumstance. For a child who has lost a parent, nothing feels fixed or stable. The prominence of television is crucial, as TV, for a certain generation, became the abandoned child’s only companion (unless they have a sibling sharing the foxhole).
The long, seemingly monotonous shots in Skinamarink will be trying for some, yet there are rewards if you have the patience: occasional, eerie beauty (that night-light evokes a twinkling star dangling in space) and clever filmmaking. On the TV at one point, a sequence from the Merrie Melodies short “Prest-O Change-O,” in which a Bugs Bunny prototype makes himself disappear, strangely repeats a few times. Shortly thereafter, a stuffed animal on the floor in front of the TV vanishes before our eyes—a suggestion of the way childhood perception works.
What else does the movie mean for us to perceive? There are clues, including a gripping middle section in the father’s bedroom where we get a glimpse of a figure who is presumably the mother. (Another clue comes when one sibling says to the other: “I don’t want to talk about mom.”) Is Skinamarink a story of divorce or something more sinister?
A few gestures toward explicit horror suggest the latter, which is not necessarily to the movie’s benefit. (This works best as a quotidian nightmare.) The film also suffers from a few too many of those static shots; not all of these 100 minutes are needed, and I say that as a fan of slow cinema. Even so—and especially as a feature debut—Skinamarink impressively makes palpable a particular anxiety. What good is a lullaby if there’s no loving, parental figure around to sing it?
(1/20/2023)
