Gonna be honest, I was fully prepared to hate this. I even had a few different pithy, dismissive one-or-two-sentence reviews in my head before I even started it. I just had a feeling that it would be one of those heavily hyped experimental horror movies that I get super psyched about and then end up bored out of my mind at how pretentious it is. “Who needs this artsy-fartsy, navel-gazing claptrap when I could be watching Evil Dead 2 and having fun instead?” I was prepared to say.

That didn’t happen. Rather, it slowly and insidiously wormed its way past my defenses and into some very primal places in my brain. Visually, it’s a fascinatingly oblique way to tell a story. It’s most certainly a one-of-a-kind experience and quite surprisingly I was never once bored. There are some exquisitely well-done jump scares and other scenes that sent a shiver down my spine in total silence.

I can’t believe this played in multiplexes! Wow. We’ve come a long way, because I remember when The Blair Witch Project was the most experimental thing anyone had seen in a multiplex, and this makes The Blair Witch Project look like Guardians of the Galaxy.

Also, yet another recent horror film that has me thinking of Mark Z. Danielewski’s great novel House of Leaves! Something about the rendering of interior spaces into something unknowable, that can bend and stretch and defy any law of physics, is so spooky to me, and that is apparently big now. “Liminal spaces” is the term I guess.

Anyway, long story short, in the great Skinamarink debate of 2022/2023, I am pro Skinamarink!

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