“Where did it go?,” a child whispers early in “Skinamarink,” the unnerving debut feature from the Canadian writer and director Kyle Edward Ball. The child, Kevin (Lucas Paul), is referring to a window which has unaccountably vanished. He’s only 4, and he and his 6-year-old sister, Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), have awakened in the night to find that the lights don’t work and objects in the home seem to be disappearing. And where are their parents?
With a plot so rudimentary as to be virtually nonexistent, this experimental and aggressively inscrutable horror movie is mesmerizing in its dearth of action. For long stretches, Jamie McRae’s camera, adopting a child’s-eye view, patrols shadowy hallways and crawls along floors, its eerie angles and haphazard exposure settings straining the eyes and disorienting the mind. Groans and other, stranger sounds mix with the children’s panicked whispers, though their faces are mostly concealed. Time is unreliable, as is evident when a late title card forces a jolting reassessment.
Opening in 1995 and resembling a long-buried V.H.S. tape, “Skinamarink,” with its scratchy silences and piggy bank-budget aesthetic, is chillingly surreal and infuriatingly repetitive. Yet Ball, expanding his 2020 short film, “Heck,” holds us hostage: There’s uncanny logic in his looping shots of pajama-clad legs and scattered Lego bricks, in the tinny jingle of cartoons on a flickering television screen. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose picture has long been lost, each scene promises a solution to the children’s predicament if we can only find its place within the whole.
Ingeniously evoking a child’s response to the inexplicable, “Skinamarink” sways on the border between dreaming and wakefulness, a movie as difficult to penetrate as it is to forget.
Skinamarink
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.
