In a way, it’s hard to write about Skinamarink in any logical way as it’s a film designed to rip into your subconscious and release fears that few other films can reach, but at the expense of story or logic. Considering this is a minuscule-budgeted film made with available resources, it breaks so many on-the-surface rules of filmmaking that would make anyone from a studio-head to a producer to a film professor faint. It’s intentionally ambiguous, disoriented in its shot composition, choppily and illogically edited, with shots that go on for far longer than you think they should filled with moments that don’t “carry the story long”. It’s intentional in its withholding of information, repetitious in its moments, a little pretentious and kind of boring at times. But it’s also mind-searingly terrifying and gives you an unsettling feeling that makes you feel claustrophobic in the moment and then grows in your mind as soon as the film abruptly ends. I almost feel bad for any other film you will watch in the week that follows as I don’t imagine any will be able to garner any headspace that will be filled with the images, sounds, shots, screeches and voices that fills Skinamarink.

What works best though is the juxtaposition of the images to the underlying themes presented. In a way, this is a haunted funhouse a la James Wan. On the other hand, it’s a deeply disturbed and borderline dangerous movie that hits on something truly horrible – the endangerment of children. Here is what is known, and it is little. Two children wake up and their parents appear to be gone. Things are off. The kids attempt to find their parents and then attempt to distract themselves and bond in protection from a threat they (or we) don’t understand. And then bad things begin to happen. Child abuse/pain/neglect is at the center, but it’s only understood as a broad danger. What’s really happening is unexplainable and intentionally not understood. Trying to understand is moot. All we can do is place theories and those theories can range from supernatural to alien/cosmic horror, to analogous for parental abuse to just being in a fugue state somewhere between consciousness and a
dream. Between the terror in the confusion, the innocence of the protagonists, and the child-level POV filming, Skinamarink gave me the feelings of being a young kid and what horror meant to me then. Instead of making the world bigger and bigger by raising the stakes, as some horror films do, this film infantiles the viewer with its confining view of the world. It’s a film I may never fully understand, but I’ll also probably never stop thinking of.