Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2022) (Patreon)

Few recent films have initially seemed as original, or as inscrutable, as Skinamarink, the debut feature from Kyle Edward Ball. Seemingly on its way to becoming a cult object since its premiere this past summer at Montreal's Fantasia Fest, Skinamarink is fascinating primarily because it draws on frames of reference too out-there even for so-called "elevated horror." Looking both forward and back, Ball understands, at least at first, that there are few things scarier than utter confusion, on both a narrative and a spatial level. Alas, Skinamarink quickly runs out of ideas and, although it might not be apparent at first, settles into a well-worn groove.

The plot is skeletal, almost not worth mentioning. Two small children, siblings Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) find themselves lost in their own suburban home, which has somehow morphed into a darkened nightmare-scape. At the start of the film, Kevin falls down the stairs while sleepwalking -- unseen, like most of the film's action -- and we hear his father (Ross Paul) tell someone on the phone that he went to the emergency room but was okay, no serious injury. Before long, the kids wake up to discover their father is missing, and their home is undergoing a variety of physical anomalies. The toilet appears and disappears. Walls shift, doors vanish, and in time, the walls, floor, and ceiling trade places with respect to gravity, as if some outside force were rotating the home like a giant puzzle box.

But the events ostensibly depicted -- this or that unexplained event -- are decidedly secondary to the all-encompassing mood of Skinamarink. The film is shot in extremely low light conditions, and the visual field is always dominated by swirling grain. What's more, the camera is always unnaturally low, limiting the frame of reference to the point of view of a disoriented child. Ball is not merely making a normal space spooky; he understands that children must learn to live at home, that there is nothing inherently comforting about domestic architecture and that only the love and support (or lack thereof) received at home determine how we feel about these bare walls, slowly turning ceiling fans, or gently swaying vertical blinds.

So even more than something like The Blair Witch Project, Skinamarink capitalizes on the innate sense of dread that is provoked by offscreen space, or the too-quiet murmurs in the sound design that indicate that something is there, but is just out of earshot. One Letterboxd reviewer semi-jokingly called "creepypasta Peter Gidal," and this is actually quite accurate, as far as it goes. Much of Skinamarink resembles an avant-garde film, such as Gidal's Room Film or Manuela de Laborde's As Without So Within, films in which planes and volumes threaten to form within the vast expanse of the film image, but just as often dissolve into pure texture. 

And, in terms of the basic scenario of Skinamarink, I was very often reminded of Leslie Thornton's Peggy and Fred in Hell, a serialized epic involving two kids left to their own devices in a media-saturated, possibly post-apocalyptic world, trying to make meaning within their highly circumscribed perspective. Freud famously called children "little detectives," as they are bewildered by the routines and rituals of adult life but are desperate to figure out what they mean. And Skinamarink combines this impulse with more contemporary expressions of investigative meaning-making. With its major events largely unexplained -- Where did dad go? Is mom alive? Are the kids in a dream or in some alternate dimension -- Skinamarink invites comparison with web-based creepypasta storytelling, leaving its gaps and omissions to be filled through the reader's participation.

But the closest analogue to Ball's method of spatial disorientation is the web-based "liminal horror" genre, in which the disturbing affect of ambiguous spaces (empty office buildings, abandoned malls, decommissioned factories) is harnessed for a kind of breakdown of spatial subjectivity. The terror does not come from what is in the spaces, but in our short-circuited ability to cognitively map our environment. One of the best known and best executed examples of this work is the "Backrooms" web series. A group of investigators have unlocked a parallel dimension where our basic structural laws don't hold.

Skinamarink holds so much promise for so long, but it eventually succumbs to a few unfortunate tendencies. First, past about the 45-minute mark, it mostly just becomes a series of iterations of itself. There may be a reason why Internet shorts are the preferred vehicle for liminal horror. No matter how mysterious a space may be, viewers become accustomed to it. We come to expect the uncanny and so we paradoxically start making our own sense of it. But perhaps worse than this, Ball appears to intuit this problem and spends the final half-hour or so introducing the elements of a standard horror film. The evil entity is there, it has a voice, it lures children to their doom, and it may even have a name. 

The last spoken line of the film is Kevin asking the voice what it's called, and this pretty clearly seems to produce a retroactive referent for the film's title, up to then unexplained. This not only makes Skinamarink more conventional, very much akin to The Babadook. It seems to close off certain avenues of uncertainty. There is some sort of menace that these children face, and though it could be a twisted psychologizing of some actual trauma (grief, molestation, abandonment), it definitely cannot be seen as a purely formalist, cinematic force. Ball titled his film with a slight variation on a nonsense word from a childhood song. ("Skidamarinky-dinky-dink, skidamarinky-doo, I love you...") But I suppose there was more implied by substituting the word "skin" than I first thought. By its end, Skinamarink suggests that there is no nonsense, that everything has some concrete reference point, whether you see it or not. That such an original film would ultimately foreclose imagination in this way is a disappointment, to say the least.