Synopsis
In this house...
Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished.
2022 Directed by Kyle Edward Ball
Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished.
The House, Skinamarink: El despertar del mal, 스키나마링크, Skinamarink: Canção de Ninar, Паранормальные явления: Скинамаринк, 魔童谣, 魔童謠
You _really_ need to be immersed for this movie to work, like you gotta watch it alone without lights. Not even as like a 'challenge', but just because the movie is so slow and the shots are so ambiguous it's very easy to lose your attention. If you watch it with friends, you guys are just gonna be talking the whole time like "OH whats that? is that a face? wait what room is this? have we seen this corner before. OH is that the dad? Did the legos move?" etc. My immersion wasn't great for this movie because I was eating a really yummy bowl of chili, honestly it was REALLY good chili I really knocked it out of…
seeing this in theaters, on a big screen with a rapt crowd, was an early highlight of my 2023. on this viewing the moment-to-moment narrative was a lot clearer to me, and i felt like the size of the screen made it even easier to get lost in all that hypnotic (fake) grain.
i know the use of digital grain has been somewhat contentious but i think it's used pretty brilliantly here. there are so many moments where the swirling patterns on totally indistinct images makes you think the camera is moving, only for a light to turn on and the shot becomes jarringly bolted in place. like derek jarman's blue, your eyes start to play tricks on you and…
Reduced me to a child, hand over my mouth, tears in my eyes, a pit in my stomach. Surreal and familiar in the same stroke, liminal horror existing at the crossroads of comfortable, mundane surroundings and everything we can imagine might be in the darkness on the other side. It leaves you anticipating the revelation, begging to see something that might reduce the horror with its tangibility, but when it finally begins to reveal itself you can only shrink and cower and plead with it to stop.
I really appreciate the swing here, it's gorgeous and the vibes are just terrific. But it's fucking boring, I'm so sorry. At an hour-forty I was just begging for it to do something, anything. Absolutely and admirably not like anything you're likely to find in a multiplex ever again, but I'd argue there's a really good reason for that.
I think this movie only works if you like 100% buy into it, I left the theater crying and the people behind me were cracking up saying it was just like a YouTube poop. I think this effected me so much because it hit some very specific emotions that I’ve never seen in film before, so if you’re the type of person who has ever laid awake for hours in bed because for no reason at all you have convinced yourself that if you fall asleep you’re going to die, then this movie will probably be scary. Also if I hadn’t watched this in a theater I would have completely just turned it off so I really think that helped. Also I’ve decided I hate being scared