Reviews Film / Skinamarink

A Difficult, but Profoundly Inventive and Terrifying Risk

Just throwing it out now: Skinamarink will absolutely not be for everyone, even dedicated horror buffs. The things that scare us in and out of fiction are immensely subjective, and experimental horror like this demands a kind of context the audience will need to invest in but may not be keen on. Skinamarink, by design, is not conventional — it has a glacial pace, largely static cinematography, and is minimal on "features" like cast or complex visuals, things I fear the vast majority of new viewers coming in on the online hype expecting "the scariest new movie ever made" were never primed on. Expect a traditional horror narrative, it will suffer.

Expect a new, open-ended horror experience, Skinamarink is BUGSHIT TERRIFYING

The immediate strength of Skinamarink's odd storytelling is its emphasis on elements that form the logic found within a nightmare: it's clear something is wrong once our child protags notice the windows and doors of their house have vanished, but they initially have only a tenuous grasp on how surreal and bad it is. Then things get worse: immediate comforts like toys vanish. Lights go out, darkness pervades. Noises and increasingly unrecognizable images telling you nothing except SOMETHING IS WRONG become frequent, and as you start to dread what comes next, the more you realize: YOU CAN'T LEAVE, YOU ARE TRAPPED

The static shots depriving movement, the low camera angles making rooms seem gargantuan and alien even before the imagery itself becomes more intense, the sound which lapses between quietly ambient and inexplicably incoherent, and the lack of a definite narrative throughline in lieu of a continuous string of primal reaction to primal fear to primal reaction — it's hypnotizing how well this film replicates nightmare logic, and it's a nuanced and deft simulation I felt could only have been achieved by its stripped-down, esoteric, microbudget approach.

It's bizarre to think a movie made the way that it did like this exists, let alone the fact it saw mass release and went viral. I feel analog horror is in many ways still developing as a genre working to identify its unique potential beyond nostalgic aesthetic and tropes; we're still identifying the niche things we're afraid of that it can take advantage of, and I think that ambiguity scares a lot of creatives and studios. Well, here we are with a very experimental film going out of its way to sacrifice genre trappings to depict an underrepresented form of understated, but chillingly creepy immersion, and I say it's a risk that paid off wonderfully in the most terrifying way.

Again: this may not be a risk you'll like; it may just be boring, bleak, or possibly too conceptual to care about, but I'm very glad this film exists. We need more works willing to test audiences on recognizing the unknown experiences we all feel, and who knows? Maybe being trapped in a hell house by incomprehensibly scary forces you can't possibly understand may do it for you.