Hüseyin Akgöçmen

When I was around 5 or 6, I have this memory of waking up and wandering downstairs to find the house empty - no parents, no babysitter, nobody. It’s a faint, fractured memory, but I remember an overwhelming feeling of fear that is impossible to describe. A feeling of being very alone and very frightened. I think my mother had popped out to buy tobacco or whatever, but it’s that exact feeling that Skinamarink is tapping into, and it does it with exceptional skill. Written, directed and edited by relative newcomer Kyle Edward Ball on a measly $15, 000 (and filmed in his childhood home), it is a resourceful and imaginative work, with a vintage, analogue feel so vivid the grain literally crackles and pops, like a Caretaker album or something. Our primary focus are two very young siblings who, in the dead of night, discover that their father, plus all the windows and doors, have disappeared. What follows is abstract, uncanny and inscrutable as we take a child’s-eye view of this utterly disorientating, upside-down place that looks like home, yet feels totally alien (Mark Z. Danielewski’s visionary House of Leaves came to mind) - full of shadows, whispers, creaking floorboards and a forever flickering, looping television. While I was watching it (at home via Shudder), I felt so completely immersed in this world that when we get to the scene in the father’s bedroom (“Look under the bed.”) every muscle in my body was tensed in fight or flight mode. It is a genuinely hair-raising sequence and all the more exhilarating for it. Not since that scene in Lake Mungo have I been so frightened by a horror movie moment (And it’s not a one-off either). Skinamarink’s experimental nature won’t appeal to all tastes, but it is remarkably unsettling and intriguing, finding inventive new ways to evoke that primal childhood fear of being alone in the dark.