I got a fair bit of flack with my views on AFTERSUN, a film that was drenched with dreamlike tone and atmosphere, but I felt was lacking on the storytelling side. So imagine my surprise when one of the next films I followed it up with could be described in exactly the same way, but taken to a ridiculously extreme level. And I actually really quite liked it, though I can imagine I’ll be in the minority for that 🙂
This ultra-low-budget, deeply experimental Canadian oddity is probably the weirdest and most abstract horror film I’ve seen. It makes UNDER THE SKIN look like M3GAN. Or if an alternative-history David Lynch had made a found footage horror as one of his early student projects. The closest thing I think I’ve seen to compare it to is Alan Resnick’s “This House Has People In It” from 2016, though Skinamarink is like that concept stripped to the bone, filmed in the dark and made even more abstract and lo-fi.
The story is minimalist. It feels like a fragment remembered from a terrifying childhood dream. In a house at night, two young children, aged 4 and 6, wake up to discover their parents missing. Around them, features of the house – doors and windows – seem to be disappearing, willed out of existence by a malevolent presence.
Told through grainy, distorted visuals and disorientating camera angles that are almost never pointed directly at the subjects, it’s an ambient nightmare. The scratchy low-level whispered audio evokes an ASMT Creepypasta experience. The ideal way to watch this is in a pitch black room, with either a very good sound system or (possibly even better) with headphones. It’s a challenging experience and I really had to force myself to keep watching it for the first 20 minutes, but gradually I sank into the strange dreamlike state it projects. Not much actually happens in the film though it does have a story to tell. The themes at play reminded me a bit of Resolution (2012) and even Joe Dante’s segment in The Twilight Zone Movie, but the way it’s been told is not in any way comparable.
I’m pretty sure as a tale it could have been told in 45 minutes (instead of the hour and 20 it actually runs to) but I guess the slow, deliberate pacing is all in service to the atmosphere. It’s like a slowly-unfolding nightmare you can’t escape from. Anyway, it’s streaming on Shudder if you want to see it. I think I liked it. Though at the end, I was possibly quite happy it was over! Final rating: <UNCLASSIFIABLE> out of 10 stars. But for the sake of this website’s rating system – 5/10
