![]() ![]() The film’s most conspicuous quirk is the thick impasto of digitally superimposed grain to give the low-light movie the feel of pushing hard against its technical limits. The images and sounds are even more startling than the concept that gives rise to them. The point of view that the camera shows is, seemingly, sometimes that of one or the other of the children, but the skewing and fragmentation of perspective suggests an attempt to recover the unworldliness and incomprehension of early childhood, the fragmentary incoherence of children’s experience, even the psychoanalytic substitution of heavily cathected and weirdly dominant minor objects or visions to stand in for much more momentous ones. “Skinamarink” (the song isn’t heard but it’s hinted at) presents a kind of objective subjectivity: an audiovisual representation of states of mind, even of memories, which are grafted onto a dramatic framework that’s a horror-film standby. Their mother (Jaime Hill) is there, too, sort of, but offers little comfort or security. The protagonists are two children, Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) and Kevin (Lucas Paul), whose father (Ross Paul) leaves them alone in the house-until they discover that they aren’t. Its few characters’ faces are mostly unseen (only backs or tops of heads, feet, and so forth), and they don’t speak very much during the film, either. It’s shot in a lo-fi (or simulated lo-fi) style, in plentiful darkness, with a seeming absence of conventional movie lighting, and its images are filled with the visual static of grain (the kind that results from low-light filming). The result is a film that’s accomplished but seemingly unfinished-indeed, hardly begun.īall made the film on a budget of about fifteen thousand dollars, entirely in his parents’ house, in Edmonton, Alberta, in which he grew up. As impressive as the film is, the many thrillingly imaginative moments remain suspended and detached from each other, like scattered storyboard frames. ![]() Ball displays a distinctive sensibility that’s intrinsically related to the experience of horror itself, but he forces it into the confines of a familiar horror story in which he displays little interest or confidence. The conflict cropped up recently with the release of “ M3GAN,” and it gets an even more vigorous and troubling workout in “Skinamarink,” the extraordinarily original first feature by Kyle Edward Ball. The problem of genre is that the effort to satisfy built-in expectations gets in the way of a free approach to the subject at hand. ![]()
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