Skinamarink

                   
Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink has been hailed as this decade's The Blair Witch Project, but, you can't fool me, Skinamarink is an art film rather than a horror film and all the better for it. The plot, like the cinematography, is murky at best, but Mr. Ball's use of negative space gives the film a palpable feeling of claustrophobia. Some sort of foreign entity is bedeviling the lives of a young couple and their four year old son (and there seem to be other domestic inhabitants of some kind). The film is entirely within the confines of their home. Portals and items in the house disappear and then reappear. Mom has been zombified and Dad is conspicuous in his absence. The film is not dynamic enough to be terrifying, but gives off the uncanny sense of unease found in other sick house horror works like The Fall of the House of Usher and The Shining. 

Set in 1995, Skinamarink has a purposefully distressed look to it. Video snow is a feature of the film just as it was with the scrambled broadcast feeds of UHF channels during my childhood. This fits in with the film's theme of obfuscation. Point of view is scrambled and unclear in Skinamarink and one's bearings are lost within the labyrinth of the house (or houses). Some of this is done to disguise the ultra low budget nature of the film, but it also reflects the helplessness of a young protagonist without a proper frame of reference. 

A number of video screens appear during the course of the film adding to a sense of apprehension. Public domain cartoons sometimes play on the television, ironically commenting on the vulnerability of the house's inhabitants. Sometimes the screens project an artificial and piercing white light. There is no natural light in the film, no light from windows or skylights. This heightens our sense of the house being a monstrous cage with no access to the outer world. The house seems controlled by forces beyond the ken of its inhabitants.

I stress that the film is an art film rather than a horror film because I think it will bore most fans of commercial horror films. There are no jump scares and no sense of narrative drive or character development. The film has its longueurs and could have been cut by twenty minutes or so to no ill effect. The camera focuses on walls, ceilings, furniture, and Legos rather than on human beings. Yet, Skinamarink excited me more than any first feature has in some time. Like a lot of avant-garde directors, Ball is a little too enamored with banality for its own sake, but Skinamarink shows he can create a cinema of intellect and feeling out of the barest means possible. Skinamarink, like Eraserhead before it, will give its maker entrée into Hollywood on talent alone. Whether Mr. Ball can make the necessary compromises to be a force in commercial cinema remains to be seen.