SKINAMARINK (2023)
Label: Acorn Media International
Region Code: B
Rating: 15 Cert.
Audio: Uncompressed English DTS-HD MA 5.1 with Optional English Subtitles and Descriptive Audio (DTS-HD MA)
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1)
Director: Kyle Edward Ball
Cast: Lucas Paul, Dali Rose Tetreault, Ross Paul, Jaime Hill
Writer-director Kyle Edward Ball's debut feature film Skinamarink (2023) is set 1995 according to a title card early on, four-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) and his six-year-old sister Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) wake up in the middle of the night, their father is nowhere to be found and the windows and doors in their home have vanished without explanation, they're drawn into a ambiguous cosmic horror as a dark entity creeps in the darkness beckoning them to commit horrific acts.
This sounds like a creepy good time on paper but I found the execution a bit wanting. At 140 minutes long this felt to me like a decent half-hour short stretched too thin with too little reward for the stamina it took to get through it this cinematic endurance under the guise of supernatural horror. Undoubtedly the creepy static shots that comprise this movie about a pair of young children trapped in a darkened house menaced by a supernatural entity does at times get pretty eerie, the interior of the house lit only by the creepy flickering glow of a cathode-ray tube TV as the kids watch VHS tapes of obscure old cartoons, and shot from odd angles that almost feel like a child's perspective, as if they were hiding under furniture looking up at the ceiling, it's very unsettling and off-putting. The siblings are never truly seen other than lower extremities of their legs or from the backside, and dialogue and the non-existent narrative never point towards something to latch onto, it was all a bit vague and far too ambiguous for me to really "get into it", though it does generate some unsettling atmosphere using the skewed angles, a constant layer of white noise on the audio track, the at times creepy dialogue and music their watching on TV, and the disembodied voice of the entity.
Eventually it becomes clear that there’s something else there with them, and it's not their parents, though their parents to make an appearance, sort of. While I was watching it, going in with zero information and never even having watched the trailer, I started to try to put together some fluid ideas about what was happening here exactly. At the top of the film you hear the kid's father talking on the phone to someone, he speaks about how Kevin had injured himself and was taken to the hospital, but no stitches were required, he just bumped his head, perhaps during a sleepwalking episode. Is what we are seeing a traumatic brain injury as experienced through Kevin's eyes, are the kids dead, is this a ghostly visitation? There's not a lot of dialogue, the kids whisper to themselves in distorted tones, they reference their mother in a way that made me think she might be dead, or something awful happened to her, perhaps she and they are victims of abuse at the hands of the father, did that abuse lead to the injury referenced head injury? At a certain point I decided that there were not enough breadcrumbs here for me to follow to any informed sort of conclusion, by design, it's meant to be vague, it's an experience film, and not a destination and you just sort of have to let it wash over you, and it either works for you or it does not.
For me it didn't quite work, I applaud the unique visual aspect of it, much the same way that witching the first Paranormal Activity at the cinema had me combing the negative spaces in the image for any sort of spectral activity, I found myself peering into the the impossible to penetrate darkness throughout the film looking for some image of the dark entity that is menacing these kids, the way it is shot it sort of gives you an odd night blindness, like walking into a lit room and turning the lights off, only once your eyes adjust the light are momentarily turned back on again, and your lost again - it makes for a unique viewing experience, though not one I can say that I honestly enjoyed, but one that I liked more in theory than in practice. I certainly didn;t hate it, it just wasn't for me, from what I've observed it's been a pretty divisive film, so it's been shaking things up, and that's always a good thing.
Audio/Video: Skinamarink (2023) arrives on region-free Blu-ray from Acorn Media International in 1080p HD widescreen (2.39:1), but you wouldn't know it by the image here which is denigrated by design. I believe it was shot digitally the film has the appearance of a Super 8mm film poorly transferred to a dupey VHS, then dubbed onto another VHS. Contrast is poor, fine detail is non-existent, and colors are muted, with black levels that never truly achieve anything resembling more than milky blue/gray. Shot with low-light levels, seemingly by dim lightbulbs and in the light generate by a CRV TV seen in the film, elements of artificial film damage and heightened noise are introduced throughout that manage to make the confined space feel almost like an empty, non-defined void.
Audio comes by way of English DTS-HD 5.1 with optional English subtitles, plus an Audio Descriptive Track. The audio like the visuals are designed to emulate a certain lo-fi aesthetic with white noise/hiss throughout, sounding like a cassette you might have recorded in the 80's and found recently in a garage having been dilapidated by the elements, as such the mostly whispered dialogue, disembodied voices, and occasional shrieks are distorted sounding, and actually hard to decipher (by design I am to assume) and I was surprised at what the subtitles were indicating I was hearing, seemingly incongruous to reality. There's no score to speak of, though some vintage public domain cartoon appear or are heard throughout the film, some with music, which adds a layer of creepiness to it.
The lone extras is an Audio Commentary with Writer-Director-Editor Kyle Edward Ball and Director of Photography Jamie McRae. It's a pretty casual listen as they discuss the making of the film, but don't go into expecting the ambiguous film to be explained to you, it's not that. They do explain some technical aspects, and even discuss some of the criticisms of the film and react to that. The single-disc release arrives in an oversized keepcase with a single-sided sleeve of artwork featuring the key art for the film.
Special Features:
- Audio Commentary with Writer-Director-Editor Kyle Edward Ball and Director of Photography Jamie McRae
Screenshots from the Acorn Media Blu-ray:
