Canadian low-budget horror film Skinamarink is incredible. But lower your expectations

Reviewing Skinamarink poses a unique challenge that doesn't often come up often — and not because I spent parts of it too scared to actually look at the screen.

For Edmonton director Kyle Edward Ball's shoe-string budget Skinamarink, it's not the proof, but the problem that's in the pudding. The tiny experimental horror flick gained an accidental cult following after it was pirated, then clips spread online like wildfire. But all is not as it appears. 

The problem with reviewing Skinamarink is that what you expect is not what you're going to get; an uncontrolled ad campaign has misrepresented a deeply, and intentionally, strange film. Even though it has cemented its place as one of my favourite releases of 2023, I almost feel I'd have better odds playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun than finding someone to recommend it to who'd actually enjoy it.

Embarrassingly when talking about something as deep and nuanced as Skinamarink, the best way I can think of to interpret it is through The Office. In a Halloween episode, resident creep Gabe brings in a movie from the "cinema of the unsettling" — a seemingly disjointed clipshow of black and white images that include a cake filled with blood, a melting Barbie and another cast member's grandmother. 

Annoyed and angry, someone asks "What's the story?" Someone else, just as irritated, responds "there is no story!"

Smiling smugly, Gabe explains: "Maybe the filmmaker realized that even narrative is comforting."

While that upset, confused reaction is part of the potential problem with Skinamarink, saying it has no story isn't true. 

Taken at face value, Skinamarink is about a haunting. A four-year-old boy and his sister spend the night in their dimly lit home, as their father disappears, their mother fades in and out, and something dark and malevolent causes the home's doors and windows to disappear as it whispers violent commands from the shadows. 

All this plays out through intentionally low quality footage, with the camera pointed more often at toys or the floor than actual people. Speaking to CBC's Q, Bell explained an intentional concept of the movie is only having his characters on screen for 10 minutes and 15 seconds of the film's 100-minute runtime. 

The director developed the approach of "implying action, versus actually showing it" through a YouTube channel he started years ago, Bitsized Nightmares. It allowed him to simultaneously ratchet up the fear by largely hiding the monster, challenge his fans with ambiguous, open-ended storylines, and keep his budget low.

"I think a lot of filmmakers kind of assume that audiences aren't adventurous, or even that smart," Bell said. "And I've always found that's not the case. Like audiences are way more willing to watch something experimental and way more intelligent than a lot of ... pretentious filmmakers would give them credit for."

For the film's early run, that has proven to be the case. The technique allowed him to keep the film's expenses down to a mind-boggling $15,000; it has so far grossed roughly $1.5 million — and a litany of interpretations over what the film is really about. 

Without going in-depth, those theories range from child abuse, to parental neglect, to characters having been dead the whole time. Coma-dreams, demons and time-travel are all on the table for what Skinamarink is actually about. 

It's an innovative, and to a certain subset of the population, incredibly compelling way to tell a story. Instead of the straightforward narrative style dominant in virtually every media format on earth, it confounds you on purpose.