With his feature debut Skinamarink, director Kyle Edward Ball plunges us into those endless childhood nights in this expressionistic and experimental horror vision. Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished. In SKINAMARINK, childhood memories become the backdrops of terrible imaginings, and the landscape of increasingly disturbing incidents.
This movie contains 37 potentially triggering events.
I would say it's the classic horror movie plot where you think there might be something but not quite sure. *spoiler* when the mom talks there is a "go downstairs" without any explanation, but nothing that clearly states that the children are wrong/seeing things that are not there.
Kaylee (sister, child) has no mouth or eyes, Kevin (brother, child) stand himself in the eye and is murdered just barely off screen. A considerable amount of blood is shown.
Facial parts are supernaturally removed. There are also abstract images that look like people or dolls missing their heads and possibly other body parts. No amputation is performed onscreen
It can be interpreted that the child died from falling down the stairs, and is living in a hellish afterlife. It also can be interpreted that the child is in a coma after the fall, and eventually succumbs to his injuries at the end of the film/the plug is pulled.
There is one shot of a face that has had features supernaturally removed. There are also some blood splatters and drips, and images that look like people or dolls with no heads (not bloody or gory). Nothing else that I could distinguish. (It’s hard to tell since the video quality is intentionally awful, but that means nothing is super graphic)
While a lot of it is up to interpretation and most of the movie is out of frame, there is implied to be painful and scary death against children, possibly multiple kids or multiple times, with blood and screaming on camera.
There are lots of toys throughout the movie, and I think some or many are destroyed. You can see stuffing float through the air at one point. It’s hard to tell what’s going on so I might have missed something, but I didn’t notice one special toy be destroyed that caused significant distress
This movie’s jumpscares really bothered me. Incredibly loud, especially the second one. There is a loud scream after seeing a barbie doll on a ceiling. Then a loud horrific audio and visual scare a tiny bit after the scene with the people sitting on the bed. Then a loud audio and especially visual scare of Kaylee’s warped face. Then later a scare with a toy phone, which is shown breiefly before a loud audio and visual scare.
The plot is up to interpretation, and possession is one way to interpret it. But the movie doesn’t do anything that explicitly suggests or confirms this
not sure why someone said yes to this, as far as i personally could tell there is nothing that explicitly states or even implies that either of the kids (or parents, for the few seconds they exist) have mental illness.
The characters are not shown to experience it, but the whole movie in general is very grainy, void-like, and disconnected, which can trigger dissociation in some viewers (made me feel a bit dissociated at times).
You can hear the children breathing and voices getting more and more anxious and preoccupied, but there is not a clear depiction of someone having an anxiety or panic attack.
The entire movie can make you feel claustrophobic if that's a tendency, even though there's no explicit claustrophobic scenes. The atmosphere is still oppressive, heavy and kinda makes it hard to take deep breaths
The sudden loud noises had me covering my ears for a large portion of the film. After the jumpscare following the lingering shot of a full doorframe after the person is sitting on the bed, I went into a temporary state of shock from the loudness. Be very cautious if loud noises bother you, as this movie put me into sensory overload multiple times.
Most of the time, the camera is completely still or moving in a slow, smooth pan. I think the shaky cam people are mentioning comes from some scenes that are like a point-of-view from the kids' perspectives as they're walking. The camera is not that shaky, just hand-held camera shaky.
Flashing lights are constant through out the movie, often through the camera focusing on the TV, the lighting of the scenes, and at times the entire screen flashes. The flashing lights are often contrasted by the scenes being very dark as well. I would not recommend this movie to someone who is very photosensitive.
It’s hard to say, but leaning no because the character(s) being “watched” seem to know there’s a being/presence with them who/which is also aware of them.
The final shot is up to interpretation, and one interpretation is that a face and or voice is telling the audience to go to sleep and or asking the audience’s name, so that the audience can be hurt like the movie characters were. You can also interpret the speech as directed to another movie character, but it still involves a creepy face staring directly at the camera for an extended period of time and speech directed to a character out of frame
Skinamarink can take on many interpretations, one of which is that the creature that torments them is some kind of sadistic monster. There is no Hell, however, though the children are going through tremendous cruelty.