I fear that not enough people in the Year of Our Lord Twenty Twenty Three will allow themselves to experience Skinamarink in the appropriate way. There's a reason it's set in 1995 and not in the present day. Technology offers us an escape, and Skinamarink is designed to offer no escape. The director, Kyle Edward Ball, arrived at the premise when he polled Redditors on what their worst nightmares were, and found that many people responded with the same or a similar dream from when they were kids.
The dream: I wake up in the middle of the night to find that my parents are gone, and there's something in the house. I don't know what, but I know it's something bad. Ball personifies this primal fear in two children, four-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) and six-year-old Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), who wake up to find that their parents are missing, and that the windows and doors on their house have disappeared. They respond the way a kid their age would. They travel the lengths of the house calling for Mom and Dad: Jamie McRae's masterful cinematography makes the normal house (Ball's parents' house, which he grew up in) seem positively expansive and labyrinthine, the way it would seem to a very young child. They watch an endless loop of cartoons and play with Legos. They call 911 (the phones are out, of course). And then something makes itself known.
For 100 minutes, the film sits on the waking verge of a nightmare. It occupies the moment when we're aware we're dreaming, but that awareness doesn't make the danger any less real. The surroundings are hazy but familiar. The cartoon images and sounds that pump constantly from the TV--assembled from various public domain sources, including Ub Iwerks's impressive and mildly terrifying "Balloon Land"--provide a kind of anchor into childhood reality, until a key moment at which whatever the presence is begins to manipulate them. Voices echo in the dark hallways. There are subtitles to help us decipher what's being whispered. Sometimes they don't seem to match the sounds.
What sets in after the first act--and yes, like a lot of David Lynch's work, Skinamarink does have a plot that can be analyzed and divided into very traditional acts, despite the outward appearance of being a fluid dream sequence--is the crushing sense of abandonment that's often felt in a nightmare. That a previously felt sense of security is suddenly gone without explanation. I do not use hyperbole when I say that one scene in which Kaylee journeys upstairs to her parents' bedroom might be the most tragic and devastating moment I've ever seen in a horror movie. Not because of any shocking imagery or manipulation of the child's presence for cheap sympathy, but because of what's implied in the dialogue, and what emerges from the darkness as her eyes adjust, and what she is left with in the end. It's the moment the greatness of the movie settled in.
The tension ratchets but rarely releases. Even the jump scares--and there are a few--don't provide the relief that usually comes with such moments. After the jolt, we're still in the nightmare. In directing the child actors, Ball shows a surprising sensitivity. We rarely ever see their faces, which works to several advantages: it provides a sense of removal from reality, and it allows Ball to distance the child actors from the terror in the movie. The horror is created in the editing and cinematography, never really explicitly on screen. The two children are directed to deliver the dialogue innocently and straightforwardly, mostly on ADR, and I have to assume phonetically, similar to the child voice actors in Peanuts specials. This prevents us from being yanked out of the nightmare by any fear for the actors' safety.
It's this intricate work that makes Skinamarink into more than the terror roadshow event that it's gotten the reputation for being. I expect it will be very divisive. Many will hate it. Others will shut themselves off from it. It's an extraordinarily immersive film made by a filmmaker who is in tune not only with nightmares but with film language. Like Lynch, Ball knows how to use traditional film to tell a nontraditional story. His fascination with nightmares may have given birth to Skinamarink as a concept, but it's his deftness as a director and editor that has made it a great film, and has allowed him to deliver--and again, I use no hyperbole--a shot late in the film that is the scariest thing I have ever seen in a movie.
**** out of ****
Kyle Edward Ball's short film "Heck," which is the basis for Skinamarink, is available on Youtube. I would recommend watching Skinamarink first and checking out "Heck" afterward.
