Post by Dracula on Nov 3, 2023 18:45:09 GMT -5
Skinamarink(10/4/2023)
Skinamarink is a highly experimental horror movie made for as little as $15,000 that emerged early this year as something of a big deal after it generated some strong underground buzz in the horror community and got a release from IFC Midnight. The film is probably the most accomplished feature length utilization of “analog horror,” and aesthetic that has largely existed through the medium of internet video before, which seeks to use qualities of old video formats in order to evoke a particular kind of uncanny weirdness. So, like, Youtube clips of alleged home video tapes from the 90s that Slenderman shows up in the background of. Skinamarink has certain qualities of that movement but in some ways isn’t a direct example. Though actually shot digitally it has been heavily processed to give it the look not of VHS tape but instead some sort of very grainy old film format whose print has gotten a lot of scratches and whose audio is highly distorted to the point where subtitles are needed in order to make out the film’s generally sparse dialouge. It’s also not what you’d call a “found footage” movie: it’s composed in wide screen and it mostly exists in static and clearly professionally composed images rather than anything shaky or handheld and there are few implications that the characters are aware of the camera.
The exact nature of what’s happening in the movie is rather cryptic, it seems to be chronicling disturbing events that occur in a suburban home, mostly at night where some sort of evil entity made bad things happen. The film is extremely patient in its pacing, spending nearly fifty minutes of its hundred minute runtime establishing its unique film language before it really tries to do anything that would be considered a “scare.” In this sense it’s a movie that one absolutely cannot casually watch on a TV in the middle of the day while doing other things and expect to get anything out of, you really need to watch this at night in the dark and with zero distractions to get anything out and even then your only real way to experience it is to let yourself get sucked into its tone because it will not be offering you any sort of clear answer as to what is happening, you really have to try to put things together yourself but you won’t be given all (or even many) of the pieces to the puzzle. And this cryptic quality is intentional and a feature rather than a bug, it’s as unexplainable as a nightmare, and indeed the whole film emerged from a larger project that director Kyle Edward Ball has been engaged in to make films out of nightmares that people describe to him. This is not a movie I’d recommend casually and I suspect that people going into it without an open mind and without proper expectations will just stop it twenty minutes in for being “boring” but if you give into it there are rewards.
**** out of Five
