Review: Skinamarink

Say you’re a little kid. You’re four years old and your name is Kevin. You and your sister Kaylee—she’s six—are wandering around the house in the middle of the night searching for your mom and dad. They seem to have disappeared. The two of you are alone. Or are you? It feels like there’s someone else here—or something. What is going on?

Well, Kevin, it looks like you and Kaylee have been dropped into a mini-indie horror movie by first-time Canadian writer-director Kyle Edward Ball, who shot Skinamarink (the title of a singalong song on an old kiddy TV show) with borrowed equipment on a partly crowdfunded budget of $15,000 (next to nothing, basically). Big ups to Ball for trying to do something new in the crowded horror field, and with such minimal means. But the results of his endeavor, while striking in technical ways, are mixed. In the early going, the movie does capture the skittery unease of two scared kids alone in the dark, spooked by looming shadows and sudden, strange sounds (the creak of a door, the muffled thump of something hitting the carpeted floor). But by the end, after offering us virtually no full-on shots of a human face, or anything at all in the way of action, the movie is undone by its excessive, 100-minute length. It feels at least half an hour too long.

Ball filmed his actors—Lucas Paul as Kevin, Dali Rose Tetreault as Kaylee, and Jaime Hill and Ross Paul in fleeting cameos as the parents—in his own childhood home in Edmonton, Alberta. There, we can assume, he too once had troubled visions, possibly while staring up at the shadowy ceiling over his bed, or out into the scary blank darkness beyond the bedroom door