Skinamarink
“It can’t look like this the whole time,” I think as the movie shows me an extremely fuzzy shot of part of a corridor in a family home, while some children’s feet walk through it. Then we see a bit of a ceiling while the children kind of talk to each other. There’s also a demon in the house, maybe. Reader, it did look like that the whole time, I’ve never seen such commitment to the bit. Every frame is a sea of grainy visual soup, making you work to figure out anything that’s happening. I saw it in the most ideal circumstances available to me at home: alone, quiet, dark, other than when Jones jumped in the sink to lick up some grease seconds before a pivotal moment.
There are two children in the house, Kevin and Kaylee, and their parents are gone, maybe. They watch old cartoons on TV and we get lots and lots of closeups of Lego, much like my own living room. Toys stick to the ceiling and walls, maybe. There’s a voice telling them to do things, like go upstairs, or stick a knife in your eye. All the while I’m staring intently, trying to parse whether I’m seeing things in all the static. It’s simultaneously extremely boring and utterly unlike anything else that exists. I sat there thinking how have I trudged through thirty minutes of this only to realise it was actually fifty.
It’s not, really, at any point, scary. Perhaps the scene where their dad is sitting on the bed, facing away and he, maybe, tells Kevin to look under the bed. He slowly does, twice. He finds nothing. There’s a clever jump scare with a toy phone. There’s a bit where Kaylee has no eyes or mouth, but unfortunately that’s when I had cat-in-sink so it spoiled the moment a little. There’s a cartoon bit that repeats over and over with a cat collapsing itself out of existence, which gets mirrored later on with a blood stain spilling across the ground using the same kind of stopping-and-repeating music. It was cool, and only partially because I could tell what was happening. There’s subtitles when the kids are hard to understand and sometimes subtitles when there’s no audible conversation happening at all, which was a fun choice too.
Kevin calls the police and while the person on the phone sounds real, I noticed they never asked his name or where he was, just to keep talking to him, to stay on the phone, he would send some grownups. Neither of the children really ever sounds too upset through all of this. Their house ends up collapsing into a singularity, maybe. This movie is something of a Rorschach test to the viewer because you’re given corners and toys and feet and you’re left to really fill in about 90% of the details yourself.
I have no idea how to rate this. Was it “good”? I don’t know. I didn’t enjoy it, it was closer to work, but I’m very glad this kind of mad shit exists and I will continue to seek it out.