The Kids Aren’t All Right in “Skinamarink” on Blu-ray!
A night of silence is disturbed when a young boy, Kevin, falls down the stairs of his two story home. Rushed to the hospital to return to the same silence-soaked house, the restless boy and his sister Kaylee search for their dad who has suddenly vanished from his bedroom. Doors, windows, and even the bathroom toilet has strangely disappeared right from sight. Feeling scarred under the cover of isolated darkness, the siblings head downstairs to sleep on the couch softly lit b0 the fluorescent glow of the television set. As they watch old cartoons, crayon, and build with large Legos, while catching a few ZZZs in between, strange noises resonate through the home, floor based objects are found stuck onto the walls and ceilings, and a twisted, omnipresent voice slips the siblings commands that exposes them the darkness from within the house.
Schismatically different from any other spine-taut chills ever experienced before, Kyle Edward Ball’s written-and-directed 2022 Shudder exclusive “Skinamarink” is no joyful and innocent children’s song in the filmmaker’s debut feature film. Based and expanded upon Ball’s 2020 short film entitled “Heck,” viewers will be enveloped and swallowed by the very core of childhood fears that plays like a fever dream, or a distant nightmare, where faces are a blur, spatial direction is nothing more than theoretical concept, and the voices around us are distorted, muffled, and cold. “Skinamarink” offers little warmth under constant blanket of darkness and leaves no room for hope when parents are removed from the picture. What’s Ball leaves behind is primordial and innate terror that rarely can be seen straightforward and lucid. The Canadian picture, which was filmed in Ball’s childhood home in Alberta, is a micro-budget production of ERO Picture Company, distributed by Bayview Entertainment, Shudder, and IFC Midnight, crowdfunded by Seed & Spark contributors and produced by “Texas Road” producer, Dylan Pearce.
Shot over the course of a week’s time, “Skinamarink” works more like CCTV footage recording the static surroundings within the scope of the lens. The cast is small, rarely visible, and when visible, they are often obscured or never directly focused upon to mint atmospheric dread. Two parents. Two children. A nuclear family becomes the objective of an omnipresent, ominous presence, but there are concerning questions about the integrity of the family that Ball incites with clues of broken household. Father and mother briefly make an appearance, or with one of them just their voice, throughout the course of the night, restricted their attendance exclusively around the children’s perspective that makes viewers shrink and become engulfed in childish fears – sometimes they are adult fears as well – of the dark and of being separated from parents. Lucas Paul and Dali Rose Tetreault as kids Kevin and Kaylee kill their seldomly seen performances with the patter of little feet running through the house and up-and-down stairs, their soft, angelic voices whispering to each other and calling out for their father, and when briefly in frame, or at least the back of their heads, they manage to complete the succinct shot just in the way Ball intends to secrete fear from our every pore amongst the quiet and stillness. “Skinamarink” is not a character-driven film in the least as Ball cherishes a chilling atmospheric horror so father (Ross Paul, Lucas’s real life dad) and mother (Jamie Hill, “Grotesque”) receive what essentially is cameo roles to establish a feeling of lost when they’re gone and are perhaps the easiest roles the two actors have ever taken and turn out to be the most eerily effective on screen and over the audio track.
“Skinamarink” experiments more with surroundings, audio and visual senses, and common inborn anxieties rather than progressed by traditional methods of character dynamics and that is where the film will be conflict-ridden and divisive amongst the niche group of diehard horror fans. General audiences will find “Skinamarink” to be a bore without much popcorn pageantry to keep short-attention spans entertained and a disembodied villain. Slow burn horror usually has an elevated element to it and Kyle Edward Ball certainly incorporates an open for interpretation access door for the deep-dive genre conspiratorialists to work overtime on reasoning and explaining “Skinamarink” to the masses still trying to process what they just experienced themselves after watching the film. Theories will run amok with the most prominent being Kevin’s fall that reduced him to a coma state and what we experience is all in Kevin’s conscious-cracked cerebrum trying attempting interpret, at best guess, the dissolution of mom and dad’s relationship. Again, this is just a theory as Ball aims for ambiguity to fester fathomable, one-solution explanations. Perhaps in a type of narrative the world is not ready for, but in my opinion, “Skinamarink” fills in what is void from modern day horror, a uniquely fresh and chance-taking pervasive eidolon scare package to revitalize genre numbness with slow burn phobias.
An original parapsychological paralyzer, “Skinamarink” arrives on a Blu-ray home video courtesy of Acorn Media International, the acquired UK distribution company of RLJ Entertainment. Presented in a widescreen aspect ratio of 2.39:1, the AVC encoded BD25 sustains a purposefully intended lo-fi A/V feature, set to the date tune of 1995, much like when SOV quality films were abundantly popular because of their cost value and accessibility. If you’re expecting depth of detail, you won’t get it from “Skinamarink’s” dense static approach that all but eliminates object definition. Delineation is scarce to an effective scare tactic to which Ball tones the film; yet, the static is not, for lack of a better word, static as the current changes within the blips, increasing and decreasing visibility for desired poltergeist potency, if poltergeist is what we want to call it. Set entirely in nighttime, sleepy home, the basking glow of tube television is the only semblance of color that emits a faint blue luminous while antiquated cartoons provide flat caricature coloring. Certain scenes are shot in obvious night vision with the spherical focus that becomes unnatural in the frame, but there’s really nothing natural about Ball’s auteur style. The lo-fi style choice continues into the English DTS-HD 5.1 surround mix that doesn’t exercise every channel. Instead, we’re back to canned content with intentional hissing, popping, and distorted tracks. Aside from a couple of innate audio recordings of a squeaking closet door, all the other ambient audio and dialogue is done after the fact in post-production to be rendered appropriately misshaped and muddled. There’s also no score, retaining realism of a hushed house sound design to pay heed to soft footsteps and other delicate and mortifying milieu noises. Depending on your audio setup, subtitles may be your friend here as the whispers are so low, they’re nearly inaudible. There are a handful of scenes that have burned in English subtitles for that very reason, but full menu English captioning is available too for the minute amount of dialogue. Special features only include an audio commentary track with the director and director of photography Jamie McRae. Acorn Media’s release mirrors the U.S.’s RLJ Entertainment’s Blu-ray with the exception of a slightly thicker Blu-ray snapper. The front cover denotes essentially what to expect in the future, a low-resolution and a blue-toned, dark, inverted screenshot image of the young boy; this scene also translates to the disc art. Encoded with a region B playback, “Skinamarink” comes UK certified 15 for strong horror and sustained threat in its 100-minute runtime. Take my advice: there’s nothing quite like “Skinamarink” outside the experimental gallimaufry but it’s sleepy time nature should not be viewed at the late-night weary hours or else it’ll lull you into a nightmare of your own.
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