While enjoying the muted pleasures of a sensory deprivation tank last weekend, I began to understand Skinamarink a bit better. In the moist air of this cocoon, I became almost convinced in a half-dream that Kyle Edward Ball had himself conceived of his film while doing the exact same thing. This kind of device is not new inspirational fodder for the artistically-minded, but it struck me that Skinamarink may have captured most viscerally its idiosyncrasy. Despite it being some weeks removed from my viewing, my careless floatage seemed to bring the movie’s visual, aural, and thematic elements into sharper relief than when I was sitting in the theater. It should be noted, hopefully without delegitimizing any critical faculties I dedicate to the movie, that I almost fell asleep at several points watching it. But it’s worth noting because of how incongruous that experience is with what I have only just recently come to appreciate.

There is a space, in my completely unscientific estimation, on the very threshold between sleep and wakefulness that provokes the most profound oddity. The way I’ve described it to whoever in my orbit will listen is the moment when you realize “Hmm, everything I was just thinking for the past few minutes is completely nonsensical. And I don’t even remember anything specific.” The few lines of thought that dance around consciousness, following threads over the border into the dark and back again, sort of like sewing between two different fabrics. This space is not unfamiliar to some of our favorite dreamweavers (the Lynch’s and Wenders’ of the world), but nonetheless always seems a rich vein from which to mine rich arrangements. This is where I found myself in the tank. Buoyed by the 1,500 lb (the attendant was very specific) of epsom salt, I tried as hard as I could to relax every single muscle I knew of. In complete darkness, utter silence, and total weightlessness, it wasn’t difficult to find myself in the space. There were a few marked differences between the space in the tank and the space anywhere else. For one, floating is different from, say, lying on a bed or a couch. The mutual resistance created by the body and surface (one of Newton’s laws or something) is noticeably not without its physicality. Second, and perhaps more notably, I think there are very few times I have been anywhere in complete darkness, and none (including this) without artificial circumstances. I’ll focus on the second aspect, as it is what features most prominently for me in Skinamarink. I’m getting back to the movie, I promise. In the tank, there was a moment, after I had emerged from my stupor but before the lights came back on, when I attempted to see my hand. I held it less than an inch away from my face, and I still couldn’t see it. But, I could see something. Nothing real or tangible, but shapes, outlines, and undulating forms in a blank, black field of vision. My psyche in that moment certainly influenced what I saw, no doubt. Expecting to see a hand, I probably saw something at least nominally comparable to a hand – some imagined motion conjured from a mind expecting to see something it already knows. That is the ingenuity of Skinamarink. As you’d expect from a $10,000 movie, Skinamarink is stripped down almost to the point of abstraction. There is something so gratingly minimalist about it that it reaches the point of disinterest and bounces back. It does so by capturing the space and enveloping in it your own sensibilities as a viewer. Outside of expectation and with barely the pretense of plot, Skinamarink places you just next to the dark depths approachable only within a sensory deprivation tank. The camera oftentimes gives you something close to complete darkness; the same mottled array of shapeless forms (or formless shapes) that cross your eyes, open or closed, when in the tank. With the eerie foreboding emblematic of any horror movie, your mind’s projections shuffle from the benign to the malignant. Was there a shape in that form? Was there a form in that shape? Is it threatening the children? Is it threatening me? No longer is it your own hand or creation that you know is there, but something you didn’t expect. And when you don’t expect it, you don’t know if it can hurt you.

That brings the last point into play: the children. Being the only characters in the film, beside the monster we hear but don’t see, they are the perfect vessels to truly sell the vision. For at what other time in our lives are we most vulnerable to suggestion than as small children? I can still remember seeing my bunched up khakis on the floor of my childhood bedroom, suggesting to me the horrid countenance of Jabba the Hutt and Ditto’s lovechild. It’s not necessarily that I was scared of the khakis, knowing full well even in my nascent cognition that they were only khakis, but something about the abstract shape in the abstract dark that made it even more haunting and suggestive. Your mind is showing you something in the dark that doesn’t align quite right with what you know to be true in the light of day. To a kid, anything can take shape depending on how and when you look at it. Skinamarink plays with that uncertainty and, at the same time, seems to lean into that uncertainty presenting a reality. At least to us, it seems that there really is a monster. Some 500-odd days later in the film’s chronology and there they still are in the same dark hallway, with the same blood splatters, etc. Childhood nightmares come to fruition. It’s not until I saw Skinamarink, and, after its secrets were revealed to me through the senso tank, that I was reminded of what’s so scary about the dark when you’re a kid.

Previous Skinamarink opinion:

“Will probably be unearthed in 30 years either as a horror branch curio or a lesson in adaptive marketing, but either way will wind up in liberal arts film studies. Definitely the kind of movie that your pretentious friend will give five stars, and possibly with good reason(?)”