Hacker Cinema
Skinamarink
2023 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Kyle Edward Ball
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.
2 positive4 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
While the Backrooms movie trailer does make it look interesting, "Backrooms" / liminal horror / Skinamarink all have the same effect on me: nothing. I figure the split of people who find it scary vs those that don't is people who can "unscare" themselves.
Like when I go into my basement at night, I can give myself the scare of "what if someone's watching ..." then go "nah" and I'm fine.
I need to watch "Skinamarink".
"I Saw the TV Glow" is one of my favorite movies of the past few years. After way too many souless IP franchise cashgrabs, it reminded me that some people are still making film as art to connect with people.
One thing about horror movies is that even though they usually pretty much follow a three act structure they at least usually have to have a prologue to set the mood before the "regular life" part. But recent ones I've noticed that don't follow the structure closely are
"Skinamarink" and "I Saw the TV Glow"
Asteroid City. Beau is Afraid. Dream Scenario. Medusa Deluxe. Poor Things. Saltburn. Skinamarink. Smoking Causes Coughing.
Barbie. Oppenheimer.
Soon, The People's Joker, which has been stuck in purgatory since last year given its unconventional telling of a mythos that (on the surface) seems similar to Batman's.
You don't have to like any of these movies, and they're all challenging, but all of them were unconventional and innovative and released to theaters in 2023. This has been a wildly unconventional year, and a fairly exciting one in mainstream cinema.
Oh, wait, what am I arguing against? I read the study, and it says that cinema remains innovative despite discourse arguing otherwise! Indeed.
I feel the need to point out that the issue is usually the opposite. Looking at 2023 only three wide release films have had a discrepancy where the critics were more than 20% higher than the verified audience score (Infinity Pool, You Hurt My Feelings, and Skinamarink if you were curious).
There are far more where the verified audience score is way higher and they tend to either be religious films or films with very low numbers of audience reviews (aka selection bias)
I'm a bit of a film buff and I agree with you on the slow pace of older films being a problem. I'm not opposed to a slow film (Skinamarink has a glacial pace and is amazing), but I many films from the 70's will simply waste my time. When a character hears a noise and is about to go outside, I don't need to watch him put on his shoes. I especially don't need to watch him do up his laces. Before anyone argues realism, the screenwriter could write the scene where the character was already wearing his shoes. I've spent far too much of my life watching people in shag haircuts tying their shoes.
The further you go back in time, the worse it becomes. Watching films from the fifties, there's a recurring theme of
1) Protagonist decides he needs to speak to the president 2) Protagonist grabs his coat and goes outside 3) Protagonist drives to the airport 4) Protagonist boards a plane 5) Stock footage of an airplane taking off 6) Stock footage of an airplane in flight 7) Stock footage of an airplane landing 8) Protagonist disembarks 9) Protagonist hails a taxi 10) Protagonist enters taxi 11) Protagonist asks driver to take them to the President
Today, steps two through eleven would be replaced with an establishing shot of the white house. Some better directors managed to squeeze a bit of character development into one of these scenes, but most of them were just a perfunctory explanation of how travel works. It's just padding out the film like a student who procrastinated on a term paper.
Slow pans and long takes are important tools for a good director to heighten the mood and shouldn't be stricken from the cinematic vocabulary. The unfortunate truth is that most directors are merely average and when the mood is boredom, the last thing we should be doing is encouraging them to amplify it.