Skinamarink (2022)

Two children look for their father in the middle of the night only to experience eerie paranormal phenomena.

Very hard to recommend and even harder to digest. While watching any film, if it’s not distracting for you, ask yourselves this: what role does the camera serve? What does it show? How does it show it? Consequently, how does it move? Why does it move the way it does? Writer/director Kyle Edward Ball brings to life this nostalgic “analogue horror” (yes, it’s a sub-genre) that resembles a nano-budget, experimental, eerily dreamy, and painfully slow-paced Poltergeist (1982) that can quickly make you lose interest. Really quick! Having said that, I can easily see Skinamarink being taught at Uni, especially due to the parallelisms with the cartoons on TV, as well as topics such as perception, childhood, and memory.

Should you not turn it off after a few minutes and stay till the very end, try to understand why no one and nothing is shown in full – except for the innumerable shots of dark walls. Also, try and understand why you see what you see when the kids talk to one another or the entity when they are in a totally different part of the house. Lastly, I’ll give you a hint of a potential angle to approach it – a spoiler-free version. See yourselves as a voyeur of a once vibrant and now empty house with a deafening silence where the sun will never shine upon or through it…

P.S. Well-played by Shudder to produce such a film!

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Solidarity for all the innocent lives who suffer the atrocities of war!

Stay safe!

SPOILERS

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Be it a demonic entity having enslaved the kids in a hellish dimension – where time passes differently, Kevin being in a comma somewhere – after hitting his head, you as an audience experiencing Kevin’s trauma living in a broken home, or any other perspective or theory that you may have about the way we remember things as children or anything else… one thing remains certain: You will never know! Only Kyle Edward Ball will know! Hence, there are no right or wrong answers or interpretations. And in that respect, Ball has achieved his goal.