★★★★★
Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink (2023) is a terrifying horror odyssey exploring childhood anxieties and primal fears. It is unlike anything else around at the moment, and will certainly serve as a calling card for the Canadian director making his feature debut.
Its chief artistic triumph resides in the murky low-res imagery and heavy digital grain, which produces extraordinary febrile tensions and dread-filled atmospherics. Skinamarink equally orchestrates a spine-chilling ambience via its eerie use of silence. Add to this a sound design and mix consisting mainly of pops, crackles and hisses, convincingly reproducing the noises an old, battered celluloid print makes whirling through a projector. And what little dialogue there is tends to be delivered in hushed, whispered sentences, recorded as if the speaker is far away or underwater, with occasional use of subtitles deployed so we can hear what is being said.
Skinamarink’s plot is bare bones stuff, its ultimate meaning opaque. Two little kids, Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), a brother and sister, realise their home is literally changing before their eyes. Doors and windows disappear, then their mother and father too. Untethered from reality, trapped inside a surreal and malevolent environment, they wander around in the dark and try to look after each other.
A modernist interpretation of the scary things you think you see out of the corner of your eye, the film is guided by the spirits of the avant-garde rather than the commercial demands fixed at the mainstream end of the horror genre. Packed with nerve-shredding imagery, artful compositions, and framing designed to keep you on unsettled at all times, this is micro-budget filmmaking on a mission to impress.
If Ball’s oppressive freakery is an acquired taste, horror fans of a more adventurous disposition, those looking out for something leftfield, they will be engrossed by Skinamarink’s hallucinatory ambitions. Experimental as it is, as uncompromising as it is, director Ball has delivered a movie experience you won’t forget in a hurry.
Skinamarink is out now via the Shudder subscription service.