Why SKINAMARINK Needs To Be SEEN!
#skinamarink #skinamarinkexplained #horror
Is SKINAMARINK SCARY? Is Skinamarink a good film, even?
(SPOILER FREE)
"Skinamarink is a 2022 Canadian experimental horror film written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball in his feature directorial debut. The film follows two children who wake up during the night to discover that they cannot find their father, and that the windows, doors, and other objects in their house are disappearing."
Let me explain, why you need to watch Skinamarink, a new ultra-low budget horror, now in theaters, and it’s not because it’s a particular good movie per se, but… because it may be an important one.
www.dehancer.com
PROMO CODE: BCAT
Now on this channel, I often talk about how story structure, pacing of plot points and following strict beats, for better or worse, will be the strongest indicator for whether a narrative is successful or not… and this is an aside to how well developed the character arcs are within the greater themes and philosophical dilemma. And it is this formula that Hollywood has used for decades that when a film, usually unwittingly so, doesn't adhere to these beats… it tends to fail… unless the movie is doing so with purpose, like the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Tarrantino, who can get away with it for reasons that I won’t pretend to sum up quickly here… but this is hardly ever achieved with Horror save for the recent film Barbarian which nailed this subversion of structure slightly and yet successfully, but Skinamarink is…
So story structure is king… However, what often gets talked about by the likes of the Tarantino's is that we are in a very stale time, or era of Hollywood, similar to how the eighties and maybe the fifties were… where formula ruled over invention, and generally few risks were taken by any filmmakers… but I saw two movies to back to back that showed me that this period may be coming to an end. Accept audiences did not turn out for the first film, so I am hoping they will for this. So I watched Babylon two nights ago, and I'll be talking about Damian Chazelles’s fearlessness as a filmmaker in a future video, but it’s safe to say risks were taken… but then I saw Skinamrink which took subversive storytelling to a whole other level, and I was not at all expecting to see the film I saw…
So, honestly, I want to go see it because of the hook, that had a $15000 budget, basically student film, as in high school student, which that interests me because… I am creating my own low budget horror, and I wanted to see frankly what I have to compete against, and after seeing it, I question the thousands of dollars I’ve spent on cinema cameras and lenses, when in sincerity, I could have shot in on an iPhone 6 and cut it in iMovie… in fact it looks like something I would have made in my 20s and been too embarrassed to show anyone because who wants to watch my weird ass home movie… and again, it’s not because it’s a bad movie at all as I’m recommending watching it, especially if you are a filmmaker or horror fan, as the redeeming qualities outweigh its otherlyness… first of which is, that it's extremely experimental picture and it is an experiment of a film, so I hope I am making that clear, as it is not a horror that you are thinking you are going to see if you like standard paranormal activity type flicks, or a normal movie-going experience… it’s taking big swings, and not shying from directorial or narrative risks at all… In fact, in hindsight it would have been more invigorating for me if this was an experimental film in length too, since most films are running longer and longer, so what if they made this only a 44 minute long film, tops, and we paid like half the ticket price… then that would be another swipe of novelty, yet I do get the logistics of that, but this brings me to the biggest issue I have…is that it was bloated… like it’s a great short film but it feels like it was forced to have a certain runtime so they could submit to festivals as a feature film, which I guarantee you that’s why the film is the length that it is, because the story quote unquote would have worked better if it was cut dramatically down, because it is more like a montage of images that peak to some crescendo of tension under some subtext of story elements.