Every 10 years since 1952, the British Film Institute and Sight and Sound magazine conduct a poll of the world’s most prominent film critics, asking to list their favorite films. For decades, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane topped the list as the greatest film ever made. Then in 2012, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo edged it out. Then in 2022, a funny thing happened. A movie that had never appeared on the list of 100 before debuted at No. 1: Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels.
Akerman didn’t live to see herself crowned as the greatest director in film history. She committed suicide in 2015. But if she had ever made a horror film, it would probably look like Skinamarink. In Akerman’s first film, 1973’s Hotel Monterey, she took her camera into every nook and cranny of a run-down flop house in then-decaying Manhattan, blurring the lines between the building and the people who lived there. For the first 20 or so minutes of Skinamarink, director Kyle Edward Ball does something similar with an average suburban house in what the opening credits tell us is 1995.
It’s the middle of the night, but 4-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) and 6-year-old Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) are restless. Kevin is a sleepwalker, and Kaylee is trying to make sure her little brother doesn’t hurt himself on his nightly rambles, as he has done in the past. The night is full of subtle terrors. Is that daddy (Ross Paul) on the phone, talking about us to some stranger? Is mom (Jaime Hill) crying? Is there another presence in the home — maybe something less natural? Wasn’t there a door here before?
The operative word for Skinamarink is “creepy.” Ball has a YouTube channel where he dramatizes people’s nightmares, and since “writing down dreams and visions from transcendental meditation” is pretty much David Lynch’s MO, that’s a pretty good pedigree for a horror director. Shot on a reported budget of $15,000 (although I will wager that figure doesn’t include the final sound mixing, which is exceptional), Ball’s Kubrickian insistence that you look at every square inch of the frame makes a virtue out of poverty. He keeps his camera low, shooting up to give the film the point of view of a kindergartner. Everyday objects take on sinister import. The staircase bannister looms like a colonnade. He borrows disorienting techniques from the earliest example of surrealist cinema, Un Chien Andalou. Is that heavy breathing, or just a burst of static from the television tuned to a blank channel? Is that a figure in the darkness, or just an illusion made of swirling film grain? Ball assiduously avoids faces, showing his kiddy protagonists only by their sock feet and spilled crayons. When he finally does show a face, you’ll wish he hadn’t.
Skinamarink is not going to be for everyone. Ball’s hypnotic pacing will grate on some smartphone-blasted attention spans. But like another recent lo-fi horror masterpiece, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, that’s kind of the point. Skinamarink is not a rubber mask, jump-scare fest. It’s made to tap into something primal — call it “object permanence horror.” It’s that fleeting memory of how your toys were strewn across the floor of your room the day your parents told you they were getting a divorce. It’s that little voice in your head telling you to do bad things, and the fear that this time, you’ll listen to it.
Skinamarink
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