When I was very young, between the ages of about 3 to 5, I had nightmares virtually every night. They varied -- everything from haunted houses to cannibalistic court jesters -- but the effect was very often the same. I would wake up very early, often when it was still dark outside, and spill out of my bed, through my room, and rush into the hallway landing between my sister's room and mine, en route to my parent's bedroom on the next floor down.
In those scattered seconds, the lines of reality and dream would still be blurred, my mind half underwater, such that every shadow and dark place portended further doom. The lonely desolation was palpable. Now, many decades later, I can still summon the frantic feeling of having to face the deepest terrors of the night entirely on my own.
Somehow, miraculously, Kyle Edward Ball has made a film that eerily captures those primal feelings of horror and helplessness with his feature debut: A kind of conceptual, art-house treatment that plays like an evocation of the undefinable, as if "Paranormal Activity" met "Last Year at Marienbad" halfway.
"Skinamarink" opens portentously: An abstract image of a lit, half-open door, down a long, dark carpeted hallway from ground level (as, in keeping with the '70s vibe of the whole enterprise, the credits roll to completion over this shot, complete with the grainy texture of under-exposed film, and the requisite dust and micro debris of the era). The film is mostly comprised of such images, often static, composed of shadow and contrasting light, with sometimes unrecognizable shapes, and often without anything moving in them. Another shot offers the top of a bedroom door, and the ceiling above it, leaving whatever's happening underneath to our own imaginations.
Gradually, with barely overheard whispering in the background (occasionally, the filmmaker will throw the audience a bone and add subtitles to particularly obscure bits), we gather that a pair of very young kids, Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), and her younger brother, Kevin (Lucas Paul) have awakened in the middle of the night, to find their house, still cloaked in shadow and darkness, sealed off -- the windows become walls, the blinds still hanging in place, the outer doors removed -- and their parents nowhere to be found.
To be clear, we hear the kids much more than we see them. We see their small feet stepping into and out of rooms, the kids still wearing their pajamas, but otherwise, we only know about their presence through the sounds of their hushed whispers ("Where is Daddy?"), and furtive breathing. With no other plan, they eventually settle downstairs in the basement, where they can watch ancient cartoons endlessly on the old flickering TV and spend their time sleeping and occasionally wandering around the darkened house (yet another film that makes use of the supremely unsettling aspect of cartoon cacophony taken in a different context).
We come to hear other voices as well, sometimes a parent (at one point, their mother appears, wraith-like sitting on a bed, her back to them), sometimes the mottled, deep-set voice of something else, which at first beckons them to come upstairs but later makes more harrowing sorts of demands.
With virtually no narrative drive -- one scene, in which Kevin finally successfully contacts 911, would seem to lead somewhere but instead melts down into further abstraction -- and very little movemvent within the frame, it would sound as if the film would be nearly unwatchable by all but a handful of dedicated, tedium-exalting cinephiles, but Ball has constructed the film so carefully, it actually has the opposite effect: You can't take your eyes off it, for fear of missing a key detail.
There's a shot midway through of an open bedroom door, shrouded in darkness so only the faintest outlines of the doorframe are visible. As the shot holds steady, your eyes dig into the darkness -- is that the outline of a figure peering in? -- trying to discern what it is the camera is suggesting we see.
It's an effective trick Ball utilizes to great effect: In another shot, of the carpet in the basement festooned with scattered toys and lego structures, the camera slowly pans right and slightly up, toward a wood-paneled wall (that '70s show, again) where other objects are now attached. What is it we're meant to see? Why has the camera made this bold move away from its original position?
We are so used to having the camera be our guide, showing us what we need to see to make sense of the narrative, when it chooses more arbitrarily, our brains begin to reel from not comprehending the point it seems to be making. Which, in turn, puts us further into that same childlike helplessness the pair of young siblings are feeling, as their world is turned into a perpetual nightmare from which there seems to be no escape.
Naturally, with a film that works so subliminally, any movement toward the less abstract is dicey -- the deep-set, menacing voice begins saying a few too many things by the end, which makes it slightly less effective -- but Ball seems so in control of this hypnotic vehicle, he rarely takes a misstep.
To be perfectly honest, so effective was the film in evoking my sense of childhood terror, I had to take a break from screening it after the first 15 minutes and walk around my apartment, turning on lights and cuddling with my labradoodle on the couch, before resuming. I don't expect such a peculiar film will be for everyone (not that it means much, but it's currently lagging with a 43% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes), but for those of us still stuck with a potent sense of childhood dread, it's a sort of horrific revelation.