Skinamarink
A darkened house, the only illumination the blue television screen and the flickering nightlight in the hall; somewhere, a door creaks open, a blanket unfolds and falls from a closet unprompted while mumbled voices are heard in the distance, the only clarity the incongruously jaunty music from the cartoons which play endlessly, their colours muted and blurred.
Written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball as an expansion of his earlier short film Heck, Skinamarink is his micro-budget feature debut, an abstract single location nightmare of isolation and dislocation played out in a family home of thick carpets and plentiful Lego where the only two inhabitants are the children, Kevin and Kaylee, abandoned and searching for their parents.
The normal sounds of a house at night taking on a discomfiting aspect in this strange place of darkness, footsteps and the flush of a toilet, like Sapphire and Steel, did the house swallow their parents and remove any trace of them save in memory? The focus of the camera the rooms, corners and alcoves and doors, the environment which controls events, there is a sense that the people are inconsequential factors in an alien architecture, possibly disposable.
With the scant dialogue mumbled and often unintelligible, there is another unidentified presence, directing the children; subtitles occasionally assist but there is too little to grasp to parse an underlying meaning, Skinamarink instead taking the form of an inexplicable nightmare, an endurance test of half-glimpsed images in shadow, the lack of context making it difficult to even understand what is seen let alone decode it.
Like a children’s game incomprehensible to adults, Kevin and Kaylee play on; is something deconstructing their environment in the same way they build and tear down their Lego? The cartoons which mirror the shifts in the house are the only comfort, an unreachable promise behind impenetrable glass; like the blank, wide-eyed stare of a discarded toy, the viewer is none the wiser, with no reward given for the patience Ball askes of his audience.
Filled with images lulling and hypnotic, murky greys and browns then sickly blues and greens, the pallor of decay, Skinamarink just about holds the attention solely through the desire to understand what is happening, to be rewarded with something which resembles an answer or explanation, but with no clues or conclusion like a disturbing dream it simply ends and dissolves leaving only the sense of menace, frustrating and unsatisfying.
Skinamarink will be available on Shudder from Thursday 2nd February
