IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 2nd February
Seen: 2nd September
Fun fact about me, I didn’t see Psycho for YEARS after I started watching horror movies. Years, like I maybe saw it in full for the first time last year. Now the reasoning for this is one that might actually make sense to some of you reading this, I didn’t see it because the film is so widely regarded as one of the best of all time that I didn’t want to risk not liking it so I just kept pushing back seeing it. This is a thing that I’m sure many people do with some classic films, A kind of hype sets in around the film and seeing it becomes a landmine because you might not like it as much as everyone else which can be kind of awkward. This can also happen a lot with modern films, a film gets so many rave reviews to the point of it becoming a meme that it pushes some people away from it. This is what happened when Skinamarink first came out, due to a combo of a general slowness that took up the early half of 2022 and just a general concern that it might not be as good as everyone proclaimed it this film was avoided by me for quite some time.
…so anyway, Skinamarink is bad and you all owe me an explanation of what the fuck happened when it came out to make everyone claim it was so great.
Skinamarink doesn’t bother with a plot for the most part as it’s mostly an avant-garde mood piece designed to recreate the feeling of a nightmare from the perspective of a small child. If one were to try and summarize a plot in the length of a single paragraph because they had made that a part of a writing formula to ensure their reviews are comprehensible on some level, one might say that it’s a story of a brother and sister who are at home late at night watching assorted public domain cartoons when strange things start occurring in their house, things like doors and windows seemingly disappearing and their parents going missing for strange amounts of time over and over again. As the night goes on things slowly become more and more surreal and it becomes apparent that the kids are in some kind of mortal danger. Now if only Skinamarink cared enough about that plot to make it mean absolutely goddamn anything.
Hopefully you’re a fan of slow-burn horror films because Skinamarink is about as slow as a lethargic slug with a bad back and weights tied to its ass. It tries valiantly to use this incredible slowness in order to create some kind of unnerving atmosphere which, on occasion, does create a sense of unease in the viewer when the strange imagery and sound combination work together properly. The catch is that even the slowest of slow burners needs to be leading up to something that makes the wait worthwhile, something that takes advantage of the tension that’s hopefully been built up during the quiet moments in order to justify that amount of patience. Skinamarink does not reward you for this patience, it just keeps pushing your patience until the absolute limit whereas most audience members would just turn it off and try to find something else.
Not helping this sense that nothing happens is the choice to basically make every shot a tableau with no one in it that holds on a single location for several seconds before cutting to the next shot. Now as a series of strange images, it’s hard to deny these ones are truly fascinating to look at and would probably look fantastic in some kind of art gallery but when presented as a feature film they become dull and boring. Very occasionally a person will be in the frame, usually with their face obscured because we’re going for some strange nightmare imagery here, and the person in the frame will do absolutely nothing.
There’s exactly one time a face appears on screen and of course, it’s a jumpscare, not even a good well-earned scare but the cinematic equivalent of that YouTube video where a car travels along a road and peaceful music plays and then a zombie pops on the screen and screams. It’s funny once in a 30-second video, it’s absolutely galling in a feature film that’s trying to pass itself off as actually scary.
Oh and by the way, the Shudder rating page says Skinamarink has “Strong coarse language and strong violence”… it’s a fucking liar, absolute bullshit on that front.
Skinamarink is clearly working more within the avant-garde space, or at least that’s what it’s trying to be. It ends up feeling like that one video every single film student has seen (and probably made) where they just put a grainy filter on some close-ups of random shit they found around the house and put whatever ambient noises behind it they can think of and turn it in for a one-minute short film assignment… except Skinamarink goes for 100 minutes and in that time does somehow less than the film student pulls off in 1 minute. It would be impressive if, and I hate to repeat this, it wasn’t so goddamn boring.
What’s a shame is that on a conceptual level, the idea works. A film about two kids, barely even 10, finding themselves alone in a house without windows or doors and strange things are going on around them? That’s a great idea for a horror film, You could even shoot it in a found footage manner to make it feel like the kids got a hold of their parent’s camera and are having some fun with it… but they didn’t execute it well at all. The visual choice to look like home footage is absolutely bizarre, it’s pointedly not a found footage film on any level but are we meant to believe this is a film presented from the POV of the kids? Do they dream in a shitty home movie style? The visual choice is there so we can hopefully hide the stupid filter we put over the child’s phone to make it look scary for 2 seconds but it makes no sense with the actual film being presented.
Every single minute feels like it’s two, for a film that’s only a hundred minutes you would swear Skinamarink was a three-hour piece just trying to test your physical endurance. There are ever so few moments when it actually unnerves, when the combination of the strange imagery and over-edited sound works to make you pay a little bit more attention to it but then it does nothing with that and you’re back to wondering when the hell this will all be over. It’s extra annoying because you can feel that there is something here, this doesn’t feel like it’s boring because of a lack of talent or ideas from the people making it but it’s just not working.
Skinamarink feels like it’s waiting patiently for video essayists to explain how it’s actually a brilliant exploration of childhood trauma that juxtaposes the banality of the human experience with the terror of childhood firsts but in reality, it’s just a pretentious bore that somehow caught on as a meme. It’s not scary, it’s dull. It’s not some secret masterpiece that you just don’t understand, it’s a film that had an idea of how to shoot in a way that would work during COVID-19 and that’s it. It should’ve been so scary, everything about it felt like it promised a terrifying time and instead, it’s just a dull time. If you’re somehow one of the people who like it, good for you but I will not be joining you for that sleepover movie marathon, I just do not have the patience for any more of this.
Movie Meister Reviews 