Skinamarink
Skinamarink
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.
rg9400 reviewedOctober 26, 2025
I am going through the Science of Scare list which ranks horror movies based on viewer heart rates and heart rate variance. This movie is ranked an incredibly high 3 on that list. I'm not going to mince words. I hated this movie with a passion. The entire film is these hazy dark grainy film shots from a static camera that sometimes pans and other times just remains still as there are quick cuts. Most of the film is so obscure that you can't see what is happening, which is the purpose (and I will get to this later). There are no real actors. You do sometimes see a person in the camera, but mostly the camera focuses on odd angles of hallways and rooms. The sound design is also incredibly muted. You sometimes hear heavy breathing or static or the background of a cartoon. The majority of the dialogue is so soft that it is accompanied by subtitles, and you literally cannot hear a lot of it. The other dialogue is spoken so loudly that it also becomes hard to parse. My description of the technical details of this movie is a longwinded way to say that this movie doesn't really have any substance. It is purposefully obtuse and opaque. It wants you to fill in the blanks. And sure, it does try to recreate those types of moments from your childhood where you might have seen dark rooms or heard strange sounds from the house and crafted horrors from your imagination. Cool. I'm sure that's why it resulted in higher heart rates for viewers. However, this does not make a movie, especially not one at 1 hour and 40 minutes. There is no real plot, the characters feel like stand-ins for the viewer. It is an incredibly tedious exercise that should have been a 10 minute student film and not much more. Honestly, you might as well just go sit in your basement and close the lights and just sit there for 90 minutes instead of watching this movie. You'll get the same results. Better yet, go play a game like PT or MADiSON that captures the uncanny horrors of long hallways so much better and never does so while testing your patience. This is clearly an artistic experiment, and I am sure there are those that applaud it for being so unconventional. The problem I have is that it could have had the same impact while being an actual movie that was engaging. Maybe this is meant to be a blank canvas for the viewer's imagination, and director Kyle Ball was concerned that any semblance of a real movie would intercede on that experience. I don't particularly care though because that's not why I watch movies. I loathe this, and the only reason it isn't getting a rating of 1 is because there were one or two jump scares that did get me. That's it.