Synopsis
Two children awaken in the middle of the night to find their dad has gone missing, all the windows and doors within their family home have disappeared and something is stirring in the darkness…
Release Schedule
Skinamarink released in theatres across the United States and Canada on January 13th and was also released in select theatres in London. Yet no cinema in Belfast picked it up, so we were left to wait for a VOD release via the Shudder streaming service (available through Amazon Prime) on February 2nd.
Thankfully it wasn’t too long of a wait and in that short time it had actually been pirated and clips were uploaded to YouTube and TikTok. While the film’s director Kyle Edward Ball has stated that this was ‘disappointing’, it’s actually worked in the film’s favour as it created widespread word of mouth hype for it, with many claiming it to be the scariest horror film of all time.
An Open Mind
The film is described as an experimental horror film. I’m not quite sure what that means but we’ve all experienced the terror of waking up in the middle of the night as a kid and staring into the dark abyss of the hallway, certain that something lurked within the shadows just beyond our eyeline. As we grew older, though, we knew it was just our mind playing tricks on us, but this film requires you to maintain a childlike state of mind as it’s mostly just lingering shots of hallways, static television, a repeating cartoon, scattered toys and Lego sets on the floor, and muffled dialogue enticing the kids to come upstairs or go to sleep.
For those of you suffering from epilepsy, I’d advise heading into this erring on the side of caution as there’s several scenes where the glare from the TV actually caused me to wince and look away, it’s that bright and flickering.
There’s one particular scene towards the end that startled me involving a toy phone, but I’ll leave that for you to discover for yourselves.
Runtime
For 100 minutes of your time, you’ll wish you had have seen this in a cinema screen, and that’s perhaps why I found it so boring and dragged out was because the best horror film experiences need to be shared in a screen with an unsuspecting audience who are as into it as you are. But for a home feature, even with all the lights off, it’s 100 minutes of my life I can never reclaim.
In saying that though, for a film made on a budget of $15,000 dollars and having went on to make (at the time of writing) $2,000,000 dollars at the box office, there’s a reason why it’s being talked about and so hyped up.
Verdict
I can’t award a film 0 stars, so it’s a 1 from me. If you’re content with absolutely nothing happening for the duration of an entire film but, like me, are interested to see what all the fuss is about then, by all means, I’d encourage you to seek this out and make up your own minds. Whereas for me…I came, I saw, and I repeatedly checked my phone to see how long was left.
Written by James Oliver | BanterFlix Contributor
P.S. I’m now on TikTok if you’d care to give a follow, you can find me at James_oliver92, presenting fun bite sized reviews of any and all films.