---

Rarely in adulthood does darkness feel as frightening as it could growing up. It wasn’t uncommon to sometimes stir awake in the middle of the night and convince myself, after enough time inside a blackness thickened by my childhood home’s sleepy silence, that if the darkness itself wouldn’t swallow me, then the bogeyman-like entity almost certainly hiding in it would. Perhaps an evil laugh or the emergence of a ghastly face would confirm the unwanted company. Maybe, though, I could mark myself safe by hiding enough of my face with the covers, by falling back asleep before the monster could “get me.” Sometimes the best counteractive to youthful delusion is more of it.

In Skinamarink, Kyle Edward Ball’s immersive new horror movie, that childhood feeling isn’t merely tapped into: it’s turned inescapable, carefully positioned blankets nor sleep able to banish a menacing presence that is almost certainly in the house. There is no conventional narrative or dialogue in the 1995-set film, which Ball shot for $15,000 in his childhood home in Edmonton. What can be gleaned is this: 6-year-old Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) and her 4-year-old brother, Kevin (Lucas Paul), one night find themselves terrorized by a never-seen-by-us entity seemingly granted the power of disappearing things at will. The home’s windows and doors — and eventually, even the toilets — vanish into thin air; though the children’s parents (Ross Paul and Jaime Hill) are around at the movie’s start, if only very indirectly, they too seem to evaporate. When Kevin meekly asks whoever this creature is how it does “that,” it puts it simply: “I can do anything.” 

Read the rest of the review at 425.