A more fleshed out version of what I wrote above....this thread might now just become a place to write and rewrite various reviews on Skinamarink. Why is anyone even talking about anything else?
Even though I make it very clear I prefer to watch them alone, film for me is an extremely communal experience. Somehow, they make me feel connected with a world I usually don't feel terribly connected to. For a couple of hours they make me feel tethered to the same ground as everyone else. Whether for good or bad, film makes me believe in a world outside of my door.
Until now. Never before has a film made me feel so alone. Never have I ever felt completely abandoned while watching a movie. But this is the effect of Skinamarink. There is no one here to connect with. To acknowledge that we even exist. It is only an empty space haunted by sadness and fear. And two wandering children we never have a chance to properly see, due to all the shadows. Due to them always seeming to be moving away from us. Or standing in a place we aren't looking.
The film gives us no sense of space, even as it documents every corner and forgotten toy of one very dark home. We only see fragments. One bit at a time. Disembodied pieces of this place people supposedly live. How shadows curl up in its corners. How things are on the floor we can't recognize. And after awhile, it begins to feel confusing how we even got here, even though we should know this is only a movie. We're never certain if we too have simply become lost in the same house as these two children. If we are just constantly walking past one another, not even seeing each other. Just as parentless. Moving quietly. Always whispering.
Many will claim this is a movie where nothing happens. But they are wrong. It is simply that this is a movie that dares never look towards what is truly happening. Like some repressed trauma. Something has happened in one of these impossible to see rooms. Or maybe is happening right now. I know I saw something absolutely terrible, but I don't yet have the language to describe what that was.
I talk a lot about my personal history with film. I've mentioned many times how one of my earliest memories is watching the Exorcist with my mother when I was about four, and begging her to turn it off, and her refusing and feeling like I had nowhere to run to in our tiny apartment. Just had to sit there under the blankets and endure it. It was possibly a ruiner of my life.
I've also often mentioned how this was my greatest ever experience with a film. The high water mark I've been chasing ever since. That movies truly do matter. Proof that these flickering images can in fact be powerful enough to tear down your entire world. Leave you completely vulnerable.
I'm 47 now. I'm no longer in a place where a movie will ever do to me what The Exorcist did forty odd years ago. But tonight was the first time since that night where I felt just the simple act of watching a film was placing me in the company of something possibly evil. Some kind of spell cast by witches. Something unknowable but familiar. Something that could do me harm, even though I was completely alone. With it.
Now, I don't know if the emotions I experienced during this film would necessarily be called fear. It was something large and unpleasant and impossible to shake. It's been a long time since I honestly thought something was under my bed, and I didn't check, but maybe I should have. So maybe not exactly fear. But I can certainly report back that whatever happened, I feel very weird now. I feel uneasy. I don't know what I just watched.
I just don't know.
Or....maybe I should just admit that I think this movie just scared the shit out of me.