Skinamarink (2022) October 28th, 2023

Henry Rollins once waxed incredulous about how the people who don’t prepare for airport security checks and slowly unpack the contents of their pockets and purses. Everyone else in line impatiently waits their turn as their time is being stolen moment by moment by the criminally wasteful monsters ahead of them in line. So much time is stolen that it’s akin to murdering their fellow passengers, not all the way… just a little bit at a time. Skinamarink is that experience in the shape of a pretentious arthouse movie.

The buzz worthy Skinamarink made such waves on my social media that I figured it must be worth watching this October. Unfortunately for my wife and I, Skinamarink is perfectly designed to undercut my ‘Ignorance is Bliss’ practice of knowing as little as possible going into a film. Had I known then what I know now I would’ve quickly scrubbed Skinamarink‘s timeline and confirmed it is a complete waste of time.

Skinamarink is a feature length series of dimly lit absurdly grainy abstract cutaway shots of the interior of a house while the faint sounds of children whispering barely decipherable plot points can be heard every 15 or so minutes. There is a thin plot about the children being trapped in their home and their parents disappearing or something but it’s so little and so poorly conveyed that it doesn’t even feel worth mentioning that I understood even that much about Skinamarink. It’s as if the Director quit the project and the only person on the crew willing to jump into the chair was the Eighth Unit Director. That’s a tier so low I’m pretty sure it’s never existed! Sorry… fuck this movie… There might be one sequence or two that breaks away from this style and there’s some sort of half-assed attempt at supernatural horror by including jump cuts of doors and windows vanishing in the house but without story enriching context these stunts end up resembling the worst student films.

Skinamarink is a deconstructed Poltergeist in the way molecular gastronomic food is deconstructed, it resembles the basic elements of its inspiration but the final abstract product lacks all substance and nutritious value of the real thing. At a certain point in watching Skinamarink I gave up hope that it would transition into a real movie and my goal changed from hoping to enjoy a new movie to enduring the full length of this torture because in doing so gives Skinamarink all the possible opportunities to pull something out of its hat at the last second and really shock me with a trick of brilliance… but if not I would have a gift greater than a good movie watching experience, I would have righteous indignation.

I try to remain open to the idea that maybe works of art have value that I can’t see, that I’m not the audience for, and that perhaps with time and experience I will gain a perspective that brings a work like Skinamarink into focus as a masterwork. I have no faith that will ever happen with Skinamarink, to enjoy Skinamarink is to celebrate your own self induced lobotomy. Pretending to understand and enjoy Skinamarink is a pathetically anemic grasp for credibility. An “I Voted” sticker for the braindead cinephile.