Skinamarink Review

Streaming review

Do you remember waking up in the middle of the night when you were little? You weren’t fully awake, so everything was kind of fuzzy and there was a strong sense of unreality to everything. All of the little sounds that a house makes when you’re really listening are amplified in that liminal space between waking and sleeping. If you’re lucky (or unlucky), you might scare yourself into believing that there is someone in the room with you. This is the basic feeling evoked from Kyle Edward Ball’s feature length horror film “Skinamarink,” currently streaming on Shudder.

One night, Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) awaken to discover that their father has disappeared, and the doors and windows to the outside world are missing. They try to call 911, but the phone seems to be disconnected. They turn on some cartoons and play with their blocks, but as the night progresses, more and more odd things occur, until they begin to hear voices speaking to them, telling them to hurt themselves. 

There is a really compelling short film in the middle of this much longer movie.

This movie was filmed on a shoestring budget of only about $15,000 CA. Ball used some interesting filming techniques to achieve a really lo-fi look that ages the film appropriately. The distorted, slightly blurry visuals make it hard to see what is happening and strengthen the sense of surrealism. He also rarely films figures. Most of the time the camera was pointed at the ceiling or the blocks on the floor or in the hallway where you can see the doors. There is little movement that happens on screen, which makes the movement that does happen much more eye-catching. 

But the movie is an hour and forty minutes long. And that’s a really long time to listen to blocks shuffling around or ambient cartoon noise or little footsteps in a hallway. There is almost no dialogue, so it’s hard to talk about performances, but I kept waiting for any kind of building tension and it just felt like it could never gain enough momentum to really pay off.

There are some really great elements to this movie. I love that almost all of the dialogue is whispered, so you really have to lean in to hear it, which does add to the creepy factor. The filming really adds to the aesthetic. And the monster has the perfect amount of menace. 

But at the end of the day, this movie was just too long to really be scary. Maybe if I could have seen it in a theater with the sound as it was meant to be heard and in that darkened room with other people getting scared, it would have worked better for me. But sitting on my couch in the afternoon, “Skinamarink” just didn’t deliver the scares for me.

This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on February 11, 2023.