[Fantasia Festival 2022 Review] Skinamarink is a Cursed Film that Will Terrify the Right Viewer

Recently, I watched David Lynch’s Eraserhead for the first time. I bring this up not because Lynch’s debut film and writer/director Kyle Edward Ball’s debut feature Skinamarink have a lot of things in common with their themes or plots. I bring this up because Eraserhead was filled with industrial sounds of constant whirls of steam and things heard but not seen, a textual landscape that immediately and constantly set the viewer on edge. When we talk about “Lynchian films”, the conversation veers towards the nightmarish visuals and the esoteric ambiguity that leaves each film up to interpretation. But watching Eraserhead made me realize how important the omnipresent and unsettling sound was. 

So when I describe Skinamarink as Lynchian, I mean it both in the ambiguously esoteric way as a kind of impenetrable film that requires a lot of work from the audience, but also one in which the sound design is constant and oppressive. 

Skinamarink is a movie of edges. Corners. Ceilings. Carpeted hallways and night lights that won’t stay plugged in. Cinematographer Jamie McRae stations the camera low to the ground, mimicking a child’s perspective, but it always seems to miss what’s happening. We know there’s Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), two very young kids who watch cartoons on the TV and play with Legos and building blocks. But we never quite fully see the kids, because, again, the camera is always tilted away. We get brief glimpses, typically from behind, or shots focused on their feet as they pitter-patter along the carpeted hallways. Skinamarink is a movie in which the camera wants to look everywhere but at its characters, and it lives in the inky blackness of a house that has losts its doors and windows.

To describe the plot would be an exercise in futility, other than to say something happened and now Kaylee and Kevin are stuck inside a house with no doors, windows or sense of time. Their parents are gone, though we occasionally hear their voices, and their words are placed on the screen in harsh and uncaring subtitles. At one point, Kaylee asks her brother why their mom is crying, a soundless cry we, the audience, can’t hear. It’s a common refrain, where characters will talk but we can’t quite hear or know what was said, the emphasis filled in with those harsh subtitles. They’re also used in moments where we don’t want to hear what’s being said. Vicious lines of dialogue that threaten or suggest implied violence.

Implied is an appropriate word for Skinamarink, since most of what happens is more insinuated than shown. Kyle Edward Ball and his cinematographer use found footage techniques, with a stationary camera that tilts into the inky blackness and suggests more than it tells. It’ll turn to capture the moment after a night light fell out of its socket, or the moment after something knocked over the Legos. The camera itself feels like an old VHS recorder, capturing the image through enough grain to make Keiichiro Toyama (Silent Hill) proud and the footage it captures is grainy and dark, often completely black. Like in found footage, the static cameras make the viewer search the screen to find something. Anything. And the grain and the inky blackness begin to swirl, roiling around like maggots, to the point that the eyes begin to play tricks. 

I’d say it’s a quiet movie of whispers and cartoon soundtracks played in the background, but it’s actually quite a loud film where the static of the camera presents an ever-present (and somewhat maddening) soundtrack. Shuffling sounds, bricks tipping over, Legos loudly pushed, loud thumps and bangs sometimes add flourishes, but that static is always there. And that’s where I began to think of Eraserhead and how sound can be used to create a mood and put the viewer/listener on edge. The omnipresent hiss also makes the viewer listen deeper to what’s happening, afraid, as the kids are, of making too much noise…because there is something in the house with them. Something that, through subtitles and demonic voices, asks them to do things that sound like a request but are actually a demand. 

Skinamarink refuses to meet the audience halfway. It wants the viewer to meet it on its terms. And that will be frustrating for a lot of people. If you’re not on its wavelength, you might find yourself bored because of the static images, the almost nonexistent narrative and the cameras insistence to focus on everything but what’s happening. It’s almost completely devoid of jump scares (save for one that made me yelp and almost launch my laptop across the room), but the sound and visual design and the measured pacing gets under the skin to the point that you actually almost want there to be a jump scare, something to break the tension. It didn’t completely terrify me the way it affected some Fantasia Festival viewers and I do think it could use some tightening because the middle portion lost tension and steam for me. 

But I have to admit that when the movie was over and I had to make the long walk from the basement to my bedroom (in the dark because I’m a masochist, apparently), I realized how pitch black and endless the darkness really was. And it was the first time in a very long time that I felt slightly uneasy at being somewhat alone in the dark. 

Skinamarink feels like a cursed film. Something that wasn’t so much made as birthed from the subconscious. And for the right viewer, its delectable darkness and measured pacing will evoke memories of being a scared kid, staring into a doorway whose darkness feels vast and unending. The kid who knows that the darkness is full of monsters, just outside the periphery. 

I’m not sure I want to watch it again.