In the Flesh: Skinamarink

The top of a doorway. A child’s pajama-clad legs. Legos strewn across gray carpeting. Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink is composed of many such half-images, and for every glimpse we catch of Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) and her little brother Kevin (Lucas Paul), ten more flicker on the periphery, sustained as much by the viewer’s racing thoughts as by the camera’s focus. Even the film’s darkness — of which there is a great deal — seethes with uncertainty, rendered almost fractal by impurities in Ball’s choice of film stock. Skinamarink frequently lingers on open doorways and darkened rooms, often slashed by a single strip of light or with some half-seen shape gradually becoming apparent in the soft focus of the background, imparting depth and richness to that crackling void. Each image contains its own vast negative, the haunting presence of what isn’t seen. The faces and torsos of the children and their parents, the full layout of the house — these things are left to the viewer to envision, and so in each frightened theater a hundred diverse people imagine their loved ones, their children, their younger selves breathing quick and shallow in that dead and empty house.

The film’s Foley work is clear and laser-precise, each sound picked out with care and crashing into near-total silence. From the static crackle of the television to the mechanical gurgles and clicks of the VHS player and tape deck, Skinamarink is replete with the distinctive sounds of childhood in the 1990s. The bright click and clatter of Lego bricks. The fuzzy trilling of old cartoons recorded on tape. There’s just enough detail to keep the movie from feeling impersonal or flat, just enough raw emotion in Dad’s (Ross Paul) voice when he calls his estranged wife (Jaime Hill) to inform her their kid has hit his head to keep things from feeling rote. Ball has an uncanny knack for showing his audience that perfect amount of the shark’s fin to ensure they’ll intuit the rest of the black-eyed killing machine swimming just beneath the surface. It’s Don Draper’s maxim about making the customer’s imagination the canvas for your advertisement. Once you get into their head, the rest drives itself.

At the center of the film’s supernatural happenings is the mysterious “Strange Voice”, which either imitates or invokes the children’s missing parents, parrots sounds like bones breaking and babies crying, and otherwise tortures Skinamarink’s frightened protagonists. As effective a presence as it is, without Tetreault and Paul the movie might easily have crumbled into a mere stylish rehash of Paranormal Activity, low-fi practical effects leveraged for tension and scares. It’s the terrifying vulnerability of the two children that elevates it to something beyond that, and just as the absence of full crisis images from the screen invites us to imagine them ourselves, so does the almost total absence of the children’s faces leave us to imagine their helplessness. Paul’s lisping toddler voice sounds almost unbearably alone in the stifling darkness of the doorless, windowless house, the final touch which catapults Skinamarink well past other kinder-horror and into a league of its own.