“Skinamarink” (2022)
Hide and Seek in an upside down house of horrors.
Hide and Seek in an upside down house of horrors.
I was easily enticed into this bizarre and disturbing house of horrors with the following simple teaser:
“Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished”.
The year is 1995 but it could just as easily be the early 1970’s and the ugly distortion and static of Grindhouse Cinema as the entire film is deliberately enveloped in a snowy, speckled and grainy frame reminiscent of the static interference often encountered by the cathode ray televisions of the past as a tale is weaved of childhood fear, dreams and the nightmare visions of being alone inside a house that is often upside down or framed deliberately sideways or very often indeed from obscure angles that only capture a fraction of what you would ordinarily expect. Rather than the entire lampshade or the searchlight or the oft used telephone, you see just a fraction of those objects as you do the childhood toys and Lego bricks scattered around the rooms in a house you also only see a deliberately vague and distorted view of. There’s a chair apparently hanging from the ceiling. Next the camera refuses to move, fixating on a hallway, a slowly opening cupboard door or the opening and closing of a door elsewhere within the house. There’s a shriek of despair, a crying child, heavy footsteps, whispered and muffled conversations, subtitles in place for when the one way conversation is entirely inaudible and, despite the entire credited cast being listed in the opening credits together with what would today be construed as the closing credits but the opening to a film of the late 1960’s or early 1970’s, you never, ever, truly see who is really inside this upside down house of horrors.
A young child whispers “Are you hiding?”
“Kaylee says he was sleepwalking” confirms an unseen adult male voice.
“Can we sleep downstairs tonight?” a child whispers conspiratorially.
“Where do you think Dad is?” comes another question.
“I don’t want to talk about Mom” comes the reply.
“Can we watch something happy?” asks the still unseen child.
“We love you and Kevin very much” intones an unseen female voice.
Rather than paying tribute, as I am wont to do normally, for the performances on screen, instead I’ll lavish praise on the behind the scenes cast of hundreds who are thanked in the film’s opening credits as crowd funders to ensure Canadian filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball’s directorial feature length debut film went from short film to proof of concept through to an alleged budget of just $15,000 and a box office gross, at the time of writing, of over $2,000,000. The film is also in memory of Joshua Bookhalter who was Ball’s first assistant director during the shooting of the film and tragically died just after wrapping the week long shoot in 2021.
From short film to crowd funding a box office smash via the social media word of mouth of Reddit, Youtube, Tik Tok and Twitter, this is a monumental achievement for a film of largely nothingness. From the base of 1995 I kept expecting the graininess of the picture and the distorted and oblique camera angles to be suddenly replaced with the same house but in a present day time frame and a clearer unravelling of the true horrors happening inside the house.
There is a time jump but nothing changes. There are still incredibly long and lingering shots of largely nothing and I had three thoughts constantly revolving inside my mind (1) This isn’t scary, atmospheric or tension inducing (2) This reminds me of the awkward and unclear angles used within The Blair Witch Project and (3) Why am I still watching this?
Why indeed.
With a constantly jarring background noise of TV cartoons, loud shrieks, a child’s cry or the slamming of a distant door, this isn’t The Blair Witch Project for a new century as many have suggested but it is, without doubt, a monumental achievement for all concerned in the raising of capital to take a short film on a micro budget into the mainstream of box office generating capital into the millions.
But it just isn’t very good.
Thanks for reading. Just for larks as always, and always a human reaction rather than spoilers galore. My three most recently published film articles are linked below or there’s well over 250 blog articles (with 500+ individual film reviews) within my film library from which to choose:
“Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
Worth every minute. Across every universe.medium.com
“65” (2023)
Superlative familial tale. With added dinosaurs.medium.com
“Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre” (2023)
Spy thriller. Without the thrills.medium.com