“Go to sleep.”
So, one of my favorite kinds of horror has a name now, and that name is “liminal space.” These, in this context, are familiar spaces rendered unrecognizable by circumstance, time or presentation. I’ve also seen it described as the uncanny valley, but for places. I think it’s often expressed as “abandoned” locations, but for me it’s more than that. It’s a location presented out of its context, like when you see your teacher at the grocery store. You say an awkward hello, your mind blanks and you move on as quickly as you can. They don’t belong there, they’re out of context, and your standard mode of interacting with them gets short-circuited.
The idea of The Backrooms, an endless maze of generic rooms and hallways lit only by flickering fluorescents and full of the smell of moldy carpet, is a 4chan meme from 2019 and the poster child for the idea of liminal spaces. I’ve been a fan of that particular horror aesthetic for some time now, however, and it makes me think of films like Messiah of Evil – where an average grocery store or gas station can become a place of terror given the right circumstances. (Coming across a group of people eating raw meat out of the freezers, for instance.) Silent Hill is another, perhaps more in the standard idea of liminal spaces, being an alternate version of the world you can “noclip” out of reality into, like a glitch in a video game. Then there’s any given David Lynch movie.
As an aside, there are a bunch of related video games. I’m interested in one called Escape the Backrooms which looks kinda awesomely creepy, and is full of that empty mundane space vibe.
And then there’s Skinamarink, a film I’d been hearing vague rumblings about since last year. An experimental horror film, it takes the mundane reality of a suburban house and turns it into an unfamiliar maze of carpets, rooms lit only by a flickering television sets, and miniature Lego landscapes. I’m always wary of “experimental” films, as it sometimes seems a label meant only to indicate a film doesn’t work in some fundamental way – an excuse to ignore storytelling or editing or to paper over a lack of skill. So I resisted watching Skinamarink, despite those unsettling screencaps of a toy phone and a child on the floor of a hallway turned upside down. It’s been sitting in my Hulu queue for months, until I finally got that itch for liminal space (I really do like that phrase) and finally gave it a watch.
The Medium
I watched Skinamarink on Hulu. There’s a Blu-ray available with a commentary track I’d kinda like to listen to, but I’m not sure I absolutely need it. Certainly it’s not a film that requires a high-def presentation. For streaming options, it’s available for subs on Shudder, Hulu, Direct TV and AMC+. You can also rent or purchase it from Apple TV, Amazon and Vudu.
The Movie
Skinamarink, to get the nominal plot out of the way, is about Kevin and Kaylee – two young children (4 and 6 apparently) who wake at night to find that their father is missing. And so are the windows and doors. They’re trapped in their house, and they are not alone.
The film is immediately discomfiting. Director Kyle Edward Ball shows us only bits and pieces – a floor covered in toys that tilts to a dark hallway through a half-opened door. Furniture in a room lit by an old tube TV. Hallways ending in darkness. The film tells us it’s set in 1995, but the visual presentation is low-budget 1970’s grindhouse, and all that darkness is crawling with digital noise masquerading as film grain. It’s discomfiting… until it isn’t. Until it’s gone on for a bit too long and you begin to wonder, “is this it? Is this the experimental aspect, just showing us bits and pieces of a house with nothing else?” Luckily, that isn’t (entirely) the case.
Another aside – as I rewatched parts of the film for this review I was surprised to see an introductory scene with Kevin and Kaylee that I didn’t remember from my first viewing. It was like the film had changed, added to itself, mutating. Like it would somehow be different each time I viewed it. I’m sure I just missed it on my first watch, but it was nicely unsettling.
Roughly 10 minutes into the film there’s audio indicating that Kevin has fallen down the stairs, been taken to the hospital and returned to the house, by his father. The audio in the film is deliberately obfuscated, hollow and flat as if heard from several rooms away. It’s often subtitled, as it degenerates into odd noise (reminiscent of adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon). We read that Kaylee thinks Kevin has been sleepwalking.
The image is obfuscated too, but mainly in the framing (and that digital aging/noise). We rarely see anything directly. We see feet walking on the carpet, the edge of the TV, the corner of a ceiling, part of a bowl with shreds of cereal. There are no establishing shots, and any given scene simply jumps from one strange angle of a piece of architecture to another. This is eerie, but there are just so many of them. You lose your sense of place and sometimes your interest. When a moment of importance happens – as when the windows and doors disappear – Ball ends up indicating their former location by showing us a “before/after” shot accompanied by a 50’s sci-fi noise, because there’s almost no way we could comprehend the difference, given each off-center wall looks much the same. (I found these moments jarring, and they took me completely out of the film. Just have Kevin ask “where’s the window?” or, I dunno, have a standard establishing shot so when you went back to it and the window’s missing I could just go ‘holy shit, the window’s gone!’)
Finding their father gone, the kids esconce themselves in the downstairs living room, where the TV shows an endless parade of public domain cartoons. They feed themselves, they color, they play. Other things start to happen, there’s stuff that sticks to the wall, the toilet disappears – but the upstairs is frightening enough that they choose to put buckets in the spot where the toilet used to be. It’s possible days go by, but the only indication that the kids know something is wrong comes in one of the rare moments of dialogue.
Kevin: “How come no one has come yet?”
Kaylee: “I don’t know.”
Then a voice calls Kaylee upstairs to her parents’ bedroom, where she sees figures that could be her father and her mother, and it becomes clear that there is another presence in the house. Something malevolent. There’s a moment when a voice tells Kaylee to “look under the bed” that’s scary as hell – but the film wastes that moment. I’m uncertain what to make of this scene – I have an idea that it’s supposed to mean that the whole family has died (there’s another bit of dialogue earlier when Kevin asks if their dad has gone with mom that’s suggestive), and that their souls are trapped in some sort of in-between place. It’s unclear, and it’s just as likely to be the presence – the Skinamarink – playing with the kids.
Eventually Kaylee also disappears, leaving Kevin to the mercies of the presence, and let’s face it – it has none. Days go by. Hundreds of them. The presence can seemingly do anything, inverting the space, changing a real phone to a toy one, removing faces. Kevin is trapped in a world that is increasingly a twisted mirror-image of the home he knew. One of the most heart-wrenching lines in the whole film is Kevin plaintively asking, “can I watch something happy?” No, he can’t. And we can’t either, apparently.
The last 50 minutes or so of the film, once Kaylee disappears, is the hardest to get through. It has some moments – that phone, for instance, and the voice saying “put the knife in your eye” is one of the most chilling things I’ve heard in a movie – but it also feels endless. There are more shots of sections of rooms lit by the light of TV than I can count. It was fine at first – and did evoke memories of being a kid and stumbling out of my room at night to find my parents (are they dead?) asleep on the couch in front of the TV. How odd that was, how weird the house looks in the night. But there’s no pacing, or the pacing is such that I can’t find the rhythm. I lost patience first, then interest. The ending is horrifying in its implication, but by the time I got there I was just glad it was over.
The Bottom Line
Skinamarink is a film full of arresting images, sounds and moments of absolute horror. It definitely scratches that itch I have for liminal spaces (gotta get that in one more time). It’s also WAY too freaking long. It’s a fantastic short horror film trapped in a fat suit of endless static shots, flickering digital grain and narrative purposelessness. It IS an interesting film, but at 100 minutes saying the film is overlong is like saying it’s dark at night. It’s an experimental film, and that’s what an experiment is for, you try out something new and see what works and what doesn’t. There’s plenty working in this film – stuff for Kyle Edward Ball to refine in his next film, which I’ll absolutely see. There’s also plenty to discard for that next experiment.
