Skinamarink

It’s funny what the mind holds onto from childhood. Among fond memories of bears named Bear, moments of great embarrassment (like wetting yourself in front of your peers) and pets’ names that remain as passwords to this day are the more visceral recollections of being not quite asleep in your single bed. Staring at ceilings and imagining faces in the dark were common in the bedtime routine of young Laura and I can’t remember when that stopped; I only know that, now, all that wakes me in the scary hours of the night is a stoush between my cats. It’s no small thing, to tap into a state of fear that an audience has outgrown - perhaps that’s why Kyle Edward Ball’s debut feature Skinamarink is so special.

In a suburban house in 1995, two young children wake in the night to find that their father (like the doors, windows and the downstairs loo) has disappeared. “Maybe he went with Mum,” suggests Kevin (Lucas Paul), a 4-year-old whose recent fall down the stairs may or may not have been due to sleepwalking. His slightly older sister Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) does her best to comfort him, scouring the house for danger while he stays by the DIY toilet they set up, but dolls and chairs occupying spaces they shouldn’t do little to bring calm to the situation. Setting up in front of the living room TV, they use the couch as a barricade to a voice that seems to be calling from the darkness. Hopefully the Lego strewn across the floor will inflict the same pain on supernatural feet that it does on humans.

The vintage (and public domain) cartoons that play in Kevin and Kaylee’s safe space may soothe the kids but make the scene that much more creepy for the audience; something’s a bit off in this house and even the TV knows it. Visits to their parents’ bedroom introduce a surreal nastiness that will only amplify as the film builds to its disturbing end and it begs the question: is this still a child’s nightmare? Or has it morphed into something else? I found myself deeply affected by Kevin’s plight (nevermind the irony that he’s home alone) and part of the horror is knowing that there’s nothing that can be done. We watch from angles confined by the characters’ perspectives, we rarely see faces and often when they speak, it’s hard to make out. Subtitles do the heavy lifting in scenes where the thickness of the air obscures any other sound and perfectly emulate that fuzziness of dreamtalk. The sense that what we are seeing has already happened and is being played back in some nightmarish loop is uncanny - if only we could wake ourselves out of it.

Barbie: Cursed Edition

Filmed in the director’s childhood home in Edmonton, this is a project that sprang from his experimental YouTube channel, most notably his short film Heck (on which the film is based). Speaking to Variety (after the $15,000 crowdfunded film was accidentally made available to torrenting sites and TikTok thrust it into the stratosphere of “scariest movie ever”) Ball shares the origin of this and his other videos.

 “I have a YouTube channel where people comment with nightmares they’ve had and I would recreate them,” he says. “The most commonly shared one was basically the same concept: ‘I’m between the ages of 6 to 10. I’m in my house. My parents are either dead or missing, and there’s a threat I have to deal with.’” 

Home video by way of Lynch is an apt way of describing the result and many have done so. Skinamarink leans into its art film aesthetic, lingering on seemingly dull scenes and forcing its audience to look uncomfortably long into grainy nothingness. If you were to search your own childhood footage with as much focus, you might start noticing things that contrast with your rose-coloured memories. This is the subtle brilliance of Skinamarink; the more you see, the more you second-guess and everything feels hauntingly personal.

Late night comforts of hurty plastic and ‘Somewhere In Dreamland’

That I share a birth year with the film’s young protagonist doesn’t help matters. It’s a small comfort that Kevin’s disappearing dad is played by the child’s actual father but a large discomfort that fear (whatever the source) is so difficult for a 4-year-old to process. Is it better if Kevin is in the middle of a sleepwalking episode that he can’t break out of or if he’s actually being watched and coerced by a sinister presence? Either experience is traumatic and inexplicable; two keywords I hate in life and love in horror.

There will no doubt be arguments over the film’s runtime and if the atmosphere it creates justifies its length. Despite its rather average clocking of one hour and forty minutes, Skinamarink definitely makes every minute felt. And that’s kind of the point. Our most troubling dreams, occurring mostly in the REM stage of the sleep cycle, feel as though they last for days (when it might only be 20-30 minutes in reality). You’re not released until the nightmare wants to release you and by then, to use the logic of a children’s movie about the processing of emotions, your brain has well and truly filed it away as a core memory.

This is a hard film to recommend as it requires patience and undivided attention - gifts that many casual filmgoers are unable to offer. But for the determined few yearning for a claustrophobic reminder of what terror looks like through the eyes of a child, Skinamarink is just the ticket.

Skinamarink is streaming now.