Film Terrifying for anyone who's been a child, lived in a house, or experienced nighttime.
You won't be okay.
Skinamarink is not quite found footage, nor quite analog horror, but if you're not good with either of those, boy howdy, don't watch this. It's experimentally shot from inhuman high and low angles in a house, with some shots instead being handheld POV. Faces are almost never visible, dialogue is minimal, and it can often feel a little dull and uneventful. Plus, for a horror film, there's no monsters jumping out. None of that helps.
The film details a tiny prologue before very young siblings Kaylee and Kevin wake up to find the front door and windows missing. Not sure what time it is, they do their best to have a day while Kevin tries to call for help with an unresponsive phone. It becomes clear some kind of entity is there and in control of the house and their possessions. Taking away turns out to be one of its favorite torments for the poor kids, and they stay in isolation with the threat. It's scariest that the kids are so young. Learning of one of their ages hits hard and their inability to do much for the situation and their initial lack of fear are tragic. They aren't old enough to realize just how wrong this is. At times, it parallels an abusive parent who wields control over withholding things as punishment, but it can also be viewed like a cruel child. The plot is very ambiguous but terrible to think about nonetheless.
This film wrecked me. It's the first horror film I ever had to watch behind my fingers at times. The fear physically affected me in a way I've never gotten from a film. I've never even felt so vividly creeped out thinking about a film afterward. The sheer dread at certain points truly made me want to curl up and die, the sound design is sadistically surprising, and the film flips the rules of scares so startles come from nowhere to set up lung-shriveling tense scenes where nothing happens. It's an evil-feeling film. It's also full of strong horror imagery for being so experimental, low-budget and not really graphic, and the film style never feels cliche of its genres. Just as the monster gets a child to comply with orders to self-harm, the movie got me to ride out an experience that petrified me.
Maybe more action or narrative would have helped. Maybe not.
Overall, this film distressed me in a way I have to respect. It might not work for you because the style is so un-narrative and so much is uneventful, but if you have an active imagination and meet the film openly, you may discover how little a film requires to make you panic. Give the film your full attention in the dark of night at home for the best viewing. It's the strong stuff.
Film A Difficult, but Profoundly Inventive and Terrifying Risk
Just throwing it out now: Skinamarink will absolutely not be for everyone, even dedicated horror buffs. The things that scare us in and out of fiction are immensely subjective, and experimental horror like this demands a kind of context the audience will need to invest in but may not be keen on. Skinamarink, by design, is not conventional — it has a glacial pace, largely static cinematography, and is minimal on "features" like cast or complex visuals, things I fear the vast majority of new viewers coming in on the online hype expecting "the scariest new movie ever made" were never primed on. Expect a traditional horror narrative, it will suffer.
Expect a new, open-ended horror experience, Skinamarink is BUGSHIT TERRIFYING
The immediate strength of Skinamarink's odd storytelling is its emphasis on elements that form the logic found within a nightmare: it's clear something is wrong once our child protags notice the windows and doors of their house have vanished, but they initially have only a tenuous grasp on how surreal and bad it is. Then things get worse: immediate comforts like toys vanish. Lights go out, darkness pervades. Noises and increasingly unrecognizable images telling you nothing except SOMETHING IS WRONG become frequent, and as you start to dread what comes next, the more you realize: YOU CAN'T LEAVE, YOU ARE TRAPPED
The static shots depriving movement, the low camera angles making rooms seem gargantuan and alien even before the imagery itself becomes more intense, the sound which lapses between quietly ambient and inexplicably incoherent, and the lack of a definite narrative throughline in lieu of a continuous string of primal reaction to primal fear to primal reaction — it's hypnotizing how well this film replicates nightmare logic, and it's a nuanced and deft simulation I felt could only have been achieved by its stripped-down, esoteric, microbudget approach.
It's bizarre to think a movie made the way that it did like this exists, let alone the fact it saw mass release and went viral. I feel analog horror is in many ways still developing as a genre working to identify its unique potential beyond nostalgic aesthetic and tropes; we're still identifying the niche things we're afraid of that it can take advantage of, and I think that ambiguity scares a lot of creatives and studios. Well, here we are with a very experimental film going out of its way to sacrifice genre trappings to depict an underrepresented form of understated, but chillingly creepy immersion, and I say it's a risk that paid off wonderfully in the most terrifying way.
Again: this may not be a risk you'll like; it may just be boring, bleak, or possibly too conceptual to care about, but I'm very glad this film exists. We need more works willing to test audiences on recognizing the unknown experiences we all feel, and who knows? Maybe being trapped in a hell house by incomprehensibly scary forces you can't possibly understand may do it for you.