In short: Skinamarink (2022)

1995. Two children, Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kalyee (Dali Rose Tetreault) find themselves trapped in their family home. Their father seems to have disappeared, and there’s something wrong with their mother as well. Windows and doors disappear, shrouding the home in perpetual night, often only lit by the old cartoons playing on the TV.

Some kind of…entity is with the children, something which appears to be able to shift and change the children’s surroundings and even their bodies.

All of this is shot by writer/director Kyle Edward Ball in a consciously experimental style built from grainy footage, disquieting close-ups of objects connected to childhood and low angle shots of floors, ceilings, and the sort of darkness where you think you might barely be able to discern…something. We nearly never see faces, or the full bodies of the children; in fact, most shots suggest somebody has just left them. From time to time, the camera takes on a curious life of its own that suggests POV shots from the point of view of something that sees the world quite differently than we do. There’s not really a plot, but rather, the film expects the audience to attempt to stitch together the meaning of single shots on our own, though it turns all elements of normality strange by twisting the conventions of visual narrative. If we’re really brave, we might even try to put our various ideas together into a larger whole, though we might – in the classic tradition of the Weird – not like what we find there.

Obviously, the film’s approach will drive some viewers batty (or simply annoyed) in an evasiveness that could be read as obtuseness, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for that; others, like me, will feel in turn frustrated, fascinated, mystified and disquieted by a film that portrays feelings of isolation and helplessness and perhaps the awe/terror-inspiring numinous in a way that befits the way such feelings can’t quite be put into language. If you’re tuned into Skinamarink, you might also find some sequences genuinely creepy.

Do I want to be every film to be like this? Of course not, but I absolutely do love this specific film for being like it is.