#Skinamarink 2023

[soggycheesefry]

Skinamarink (2023) but without any context.

[biillylenz]

Dad?

[jigsawtapes]

Go to sleep 🏠📺

[vstheworld]

so I totally get why it’s as divisive as it is, but I saw Skinamarink four days ago and I’m still thinking abt it

[localcuttlefish]

my only purpose in life is to give shape, form, and logic to otherwise shapeless, formless, illogical concepts and entities

latest victim is Skinamarink; tried to compress the whole plot into one creature. Unfortunately image quality was trashed somehow, so open the images to see it all with better resolution.

Feel free to ask questions about the design and the nature of the creature!

diagram and bonus sketches under the cut! CW FOR: semi-graphic depictions of blood/gore.

[suckmyshlock]

DIVORCE DOUBLE FEATURE

Possession (1981) & Skinamarink (2023)

a double-analysis of movies with doubles; a coupling of stories about separation.

Forty years apart, Possession (dir. Andrzej Żuławski) and Skinamarink (dir. Kyle Edward Ball) tell stories about the horrors of home life. Like mirror images of one another, both films utilize similar motifs and themes to describe the slow disintegration of a family unit, Possession by focusing on the parents, and Skinamarink as told by children. Paired together, this slow-burning ache of a double-feature will light your skin up in a cold fire and take you back to a place of child-like helplessness and surrender.

Art doesn't change anything but people, but people go out and change the world. Art is nonthreatening, but the person who is given ideas by art is one of the most threatening figures we know. And that is why art that is about communication and relationships is so strong; through depictions of the bonds that are possible between people, a special bond is formed between the work and the viewer. This is the heart of the power that lies in films like Possession and Skinamarink, and this is also the weakness. Because film is not only - or not always - art. The general audience does not walk into a movie with the same awareness that they carry into a museum. But art, like relationships, demands full attention. It demands you to be carried away, to be lost. Possession and Skinamarink are art films, and they necessarily ask for your full surrender, your suspension of self. Art is a lover we get lost in. Art gives us ideas. Nothing could be scarier or sharper than that.

Let's get into it.

Possession tells the story of a couple in the process of separation. After returning home from a long job, main character Mark finds his home life irrevocably changed. His wife, Anna, is like a different person. There's somebody else, and she wants a divorce. Their young son, Bob, is caught in the center, oft-neglected, barely on screen, though the knowledge of his presence permeates the film - Mark and Anna's responsibility for him and his uncertain future adding a distinct tension to their relationship that prevents them from ever separating fully. A family of expats in the backdrop of divided Berlin, Mark and Anna live a divided existence, both together and apart, striving to get closer as they each try to get away.

Skinamarink is the feature debut from low-budget filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball (check out his Nightmares series on Youtube). Ostensibly a found-footage style analog horror from the perspective of children, Skinamarink takes place in a home already divided; opening with a phone call between father and mother, where it is implied only the father still lives in the house. Following a sleepwalking accident, the children awake to discover their father is missing, and other things are gone from their house too. The doors and windows to outside are the first to disappear, and others are soon to follow.

Like Bob in Possession, Kevin and Kaylee are rarely given screentime in Skinamarink, but the film is drenched in their presence. All three children are quite young, old enough to walk and talk but too little to be left alone. They are reliant on adults to move through the world, and in the absence of parental figures to guide them they float in a sort-of nonexistence, blithely accepting what comes. This is what makes Skinamarink in particular so terrifying. I'm delighted that I had the opportunity to see this in a theater, because this type of fear cannot be fully experienced unless we are dwarfed by the screen. Its cinematography, filled with bizarre close-ups, handheld camerawork, and distant ambient shots of floors and ceilings, places us in the position of children, where even a house is huge - big enough to be the whole world. The effect forces us into passivity; like children, we are helpless. We are forced to surrender to whatever happens, and it is the lack of control, more than anything, that scares us. Kevin and Kaylee, like many children of divorce (myself included) are forced to navigate this trauma by themselves, and they are wholly unprepared for the task, with little understanding of what's happening to them. All they truly understand is they are alone.

I'm reminded of a similar scene in Possession, when Mark returns home for the first time after leaving Anna, to find Bob alone in the apartment, covered in food. "You've been alone for a while, haven't you?" he says, and Bob nods. Bob is too young to know just how grievous his mother's error, but in his face we see it: his relief that his father is back, the fear that he may have been abandoned. This is one of the only scenes in which Bob is prominently featured. Though he is often discussed, Bob is an obstacle in Mark and Anna's relationship more than he is a person. Their child is a symbol of the part of their relationship that refuses to die: their connection to each other that they are desperate to nurture just as strongly as they long to escape.

That both films take place in enclosed spaces is no accident. The house, the apartment, the prominent placement of the Berlin wall - all are representatives of the boundary of the body and human connection. They show us how something that once brought us safety and belonging can just as easily become a prison. This, too, is a statement on helplessness, and the loss of control over our lives.

Perhaps most interestingly, both films also feature supernatural elements. These are framed as natural progressions of the story, and not directly pointed out as other. In Possession, it is eventually revealed that Anna's lover is not who we first think it to be, but is instead a grotesque creature not entirely human. In the climax of the film, the creature leaves the boundary of the apartment where Anna hides it, and enters the world as Mark. Wearing Mark's face, the creature is a double. He is Anna's creation - the perfect Mark. Anna has her own double in this film, too. Bob's teacher, who Mark develops a connection with, also wears Anna's face. In the position as Bob's primary caretaker, considering the lack of parental care he receives at home, Bob's teacher is the surrogate mother - the perfect Anna.

Skinamarink, too, features parental doubles. Following the disappearance of their father, Kevin and Kaylee spend the majority of their time downstairs, in front of the television. But that doesn't stop their occasional trips upstairs, to the bedrooms, where something both familiar and foreign lurks. Kaylee, the oldest, is the first to succumb to these forces. The dark thing inside their house alternately takes the form of the children's father and their mother, speaking to the children in their parents voices, giving them increasingly upsetting commands. Come upstairs, look under the bed, put the knife in your eye. When Kaylee refuses, the creature takes her mouth away - a clear symbol of the one piece of agency a child has, the voice, being stripped away.

The doppelganger has various meanings within horror. It has origins in many ancient myths, and has been highly theorized throughout history - relating to Freud's theory of the uncanny. In Possession and Skinamarink, stories of relationships and disintegration, lack of agency and control, the doubles are mirrored inversions of the original parents. In Skinamarink, the nurturing parents are taken away, and replaced with a destructive force. In Possession, Mark and Anna are the destructors, and their doubles, framed as the perfect non-threatening versions of their own partners, are both eventually abandoned by Mark and Anna, who find that they prefer the dysfunctional comfort of each other. Only the children, Kevin, Kaylee, and Bob, continue to be themselves, perhaps due to the inherent formlessness of childhood - they cannot be split, because they are not yet whole.

Both slow-moving films, light on plot and heavy on visuals, Skinamarink and Possession tell heart-wrenching stories of abandonment and neglect. They carry the distinct air of loss inside of them, and are films that leave room - movies that we walk away from desiring something we cannot have. They are stories of how, sometimes, things are taken away from us, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. No matter our age or how secure we may feel, anything can be lost in an instant, and we don't have to understand why. This is one of mankind's most primal fears. It's why, forty years later, Possession continues to be hailed as a cult-classic and why - I'm calling it now - forty years from now Skinamarink will too. Neither film is for everyone; they won't sit well with a general audience - I approach recommending them with caution. But for the viewer with the right mindset, one who is willing to surrender, they are films that you will not easily forget.

Possession is currently streaming on Shudder. Skinamarink is out in theaters now.

[tiaglare]

The last scene in skinamarink kinda reminds me of the time when I was little and I woke up from a nightmare and I went to my parents bedroom and got my dad to put me back to bed.

Just to say, I didnt really have a lamp in my room soo it was basically dark.

My dad started telling me to go to sleep but I was spooked by the fact I couldnt see his face cause to me he looked like some figure watching me

[bunny-heels]

OH MY GOD HOW COULD I FORGET TO SAY THIS

ok so if youre someone that loved skinamarink because you loved making theories and connections as to what exactly were the themes and messages that the movie was trying to convey and if youre a really big fan of finding gross and icky things pretty and beautiful and if you love stopmotion mixed with irl acting and if you like grungy nasty dirty underground secret civilization on the brink of collapsing settings then please please please PLEEEAAASSEEE go watch Mad God

its created by one of the staff that had a huge role in making and producing RoboCop and Jurassic Park and it was a film he started working on in the 1980s but due to stopmotion films starting to become less popular he stopped working on it but in recent years he got motivated and fully produced and published the movie in 2020 and it is so beautiful and incredible in a dark and gritty way with a variety of imageries ranging from sexual to the brutalism of war (in a non-bootlicker way dont worry) and it is fucking FANTASTIC i love it and you should watch it its very good theres not any dialogue at all if i remember correctly and its all told through visuals and the character and set designs and methods of creation for many of the things used for it is incredible and you genuinely cant tell what parts of it were done in the 80s-90s and what parts were done in the 2010s its insane. please go watch it if you loved skinamarink please pleas please pelalslespls

[wanderingnork]

Okay so, having watched Skinamarink last night and slept on it, here’s my no-spoilers review.

1) That’s a full 10/10 movie to me. It reached me on many emotional levels. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and the style. However, I DO understand why it’s divisive. It’s unconventional in style (I’m reasonably sure “one of a kind” works here), unusually paced, and requires a lot of attention. For people who come to this movie looking for a clear and fast-paced story or who aren’t prepared to engage, it’s not going to be their jam. And they’re valid for that.

2) Following on to the above, it’s something I’m not easily recommending. You do need to be alone, in the dark, without distractions, and ready to think and feel throughout the movie. If you do that, and it grabs you, it is an absolutely grueling watch. I have never before had to pause a movie to breathe, but at multiple points in this one I did. I didn’t have nightmares, but I didn’t want to turn my back on the room. And I cried. A lot.

3) And yet at the same time, barely anything “happens.” There are only a couple jumpscares or moments of explosive action. Dialogue is all whispered. It’s no joke that half the movie is still shots of ceilings and doors. That’s probably a big part of why this thing was so hard to watch: in order to get into it, I had to engage mentally with every still shot. I had to understand that what was “happening” was an extended look at an empty doorway and that this was important in the same way that a killer laying out their tools would be important in a slasher movie. That takes it out of you.

4) If you have frequent strong nightmares, or are afraid of the dark, or have certain childhood traumas, I will recommend watching with caution if at all. I’m willing to hit my nightmare beehive with a baseball bat. But I’ve never been accused of being a wise person. That movie did something to me. Something that very few other horror movies I’ve seen (and I have seen many) has managed to do in that same way. Even if I don’t agree with the conclusion (I think something completely different is going on, but THAT is a spoiler), there’s a very good reason that many people believe that this is a story about child abuse.

5) Brace yourself for flickering and flashing lights. An old TV showing vintage cartoons is a major light source throughout the movie. I don’t have issues with those in terms of seizures or migraines, but it did create some visual overstimulation.

6) If you enjoy YouTube found footage horror, the style of this might be more appealing to you. Kyle Ball, the creator of Skinamarink, has done a lot of YouTube short horror work. And that particular style shows in a very lovely—nightmarish?—way here.

All things considered…after Skinamarink, horror movies in 2023 have a tough act to follow. Either this is going to be something that becomes an influence on the genre at large or spawns its own subgenre of imitators, or it’s going to be a one-off cult classic masterpiece that makes its return to popularity three decades from now as a movie ahead of its time. There really isn’t any in-between.

[cipheramnesia]

Actually, just to illustrate how easy it is to apply interpretation to this canvas, you might also interpret Skinamarink as a movie about how parents worry about their children. If you imagine how much the world can seem full of dangerous malicious threats to a child, you can also imagine how horrific it might feel to a parent to literally vanish from a child's life while said child was forced to find ways to survive and avoid being hurt more than necessary by a bigger and unknown world. This isn't to the credit or detriment of Skinamarink, more illustrative of how much room it has for interpretation.

Skinamarink is a lovely indie horror movie, which is just a bit ruined by the number of people calling it unique, genius, and the scariest movie they've ever seen.

It's an interesting and abstract painting style of movie which begs the viewers to ask questions about the purposeful grain and distortion surrounding the long and static shots. It also deliberately avoids focusing on any of its characters, in exchange for dwelling on the textures and shapes and geometry of a house in the dark. It's very much apiece with most first time and lower budget horror, relying on the human need to impart meaning and patterns into everything we see. It's effective at communicating a sense of some intention by the author, but largely leaves any touchstones of meaning absent or obtuse. There are points where it almost approaches House of Leaves in the way it immerses you into the house layout, though it doesn't quite pay all the immersion off in interesting ways, opting to manipulate the viewer experience in means which mostly don't rely on the house itself to be a functional living element, and rather fall back on it being a mere container of the story. I wasn't seeking it out at the time, but as I write this, in retrospect, it feels like a missed opportunity considering how far out of the way the first third of the movie goes to familiarize the viewer with the house.

If you haven't spent a lot of time in the horror genre, or haven't watched a lot of low budget horror, but you are a fan of what we might call the internet of horror (an amalgamation of Marble Hornets, SCP, and the Backrooms I'd say), chances are good that Skinamarink is going to work very well for you as a scary movie. Also, because it is fairly structured despite obscuring the exact plot intended by the author, it works as an excellent canvas to explore your relationship to horror and childhood.

That said, I would personally suggest trying to look at it beyond the somewhat basic idea of "this is a dream / coma experience" or "they are dead and in hell." So far the idea I've best preferred (seen in another review) is that the movie is the childhood experience of divorce as seen through a malicious haunting. The slow and inexorable isolation, lack of parenting, and gradually erasure of memory tracks very well with the consequences of divorce. While I never experienced death, I've definitely experienced nearly dying in a coma and being a child of divorce, and if I'm imposing my own experience, the latter more than the former applies. It also tracks well with the unusual manner of the children, who remain huddled around the television talking in whispers throughout. If you've ever been a child, you're probably aware that being left alone usually results in some degree of mass chaos at some point. However, if you're trying to keep the sole parent from waking up while you stay up late / get up early, the secretive whispers are probably familiar. So, there's some meat here to get into, and altogether it makes for a good sturdy work of film.

For me personally, I'm not in horror for scares, so I can recognize the effective dread and tension of Skinamarink, and even enjoy it, without necessarily falling prey to the exaggerated promises of the most terrifying experience of my life or something unlike anything I've ever seen.

If I was more invested, I could potentially do some digging for specific examples, but I'm just going to leave it that I've experienced plenty of horror which raises intense dread without a specific moment or idea that breaks it into a scare, and horror that deliberately avoids focusing on the elements that are most disturbing. It's a nicely competent example of the genre, but it is unique only in how much online excitement it has generated, if we pretend a similar movie, Blair Witch, didn't exist. They pair well, complimentary opposite examples of the same general style of filmmaking, with a creative approach to a microscopic budget.

Should you see it? Sure, it's nice I think. It's not a work of genius, not something transformative to the genre, not something you've never seen in your life, not something marvelous or transcendent or beyond description. It's what it looks like, a pretty good indie horror from a promising director.

[dinersaturn]

See you there

[cvasquez]

My favorite horror movies of 2023: 1. Thanksgiving 2. Saw X 3. Evil Dead Rise 4. Insidious: The Red Door 5. Scream VI 6. V/H/S 85 7. M3gan 8. When Evil Lurks 9. The Jester 10. Hell House: Origins 11. Skinamarink 12. Never Hike Alone 2 13. It's a Wonderful Knife 14. Resident Evil: Death Island 15. Tape Head: The Return of Jacob Cobb 16. Five Nights At Freddy's 17. No One Will Save You 18. Chloe

[leonardcohenofficial]

tagged by @herbaklava @timrothencrantz and @wutheringdyke to post my top nine new-to-me watches of the year—thank you all! in no particular order (l-r, top row to bottom row):

skinamarink (kyle edward ball, 2023) great freedom (sebastian meise, 2021) earth mama (savanah leaf, 2023) nineteen eighty-four (michael radford, 1984) enys men (mark jenkin, 2022) marina abramović & ulay: no predicted end (kasper bech dyg, 2022) paris 5:59: théo & hugo (olivier ducastel and jacques martineau, 2016) nationtime (william greaves, 1972) giants and toys (yasuzo masumura, 1958)

while i hit my continual goal of half of the films by women and nonbinary filmmakers, i still definitely need to keep up with deliberately seeking out films by directors of color! tell me your faves if you’ve seen any of these; do we think i can hit 150 titles in 2024? 👀🎬🍿🎥

i'll tag @sightofsea / @lesbiancolumbo / @nelson-riddle-me-this / @draftdodgerag / @edwardalbee / @majorbaby / @radioprune / @glennmillerorchestra / @deadpanwalking and anyone else who'd like to do this!

my full watchlist is included under the cut, favorites of the year are bolded in red:

The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia (Jonni Phillips, 2019)

Nothing Bad Can Happen (Katrin Gebbe, 2013)

Dive (Lucía Puenzo, 2022)

The Menu (Mark Mylod, 2022)

The Wonder (Sebastián Lelio, 2022)

The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022)

Shapeless (Samantha Aldana, 2021)

Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2023)

Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022)

Actual People (Kit Zauhar, 2021)

Honeycomb (Avalon Fast 2022)

Warrendale (Allan King, 1967)

Women Talking (Sarah Polley, 2022)

This Place Rules (Andrew Callaghan, 2022)

Nationtime (William Greaves, 1972)

Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970)

Incident in a Ghostland (Pascal Laugier, 2018)

Keane (Lodge Kerrigan, 2004)

I Start Counting (David Greene, 1970)

Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino, 2022)

Tár (Todd Field, 2022)

The Most Dangerous Game (Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, 1932)

These Three (William Wyler, 1936)

Dead End (William Wyler, 1937)

The Sport Parade (Dudley Murphy, 1932)

We're All Going to the World's Fair (Jane Schoenbrun, 2021)

Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1995)

Smile (Parker Finn, 2022)

Holiday (Isabella Eklöf, 2018)

When Women Kill (Lee Grant, 1983)

Softie (Samuel Theis, 2021)

My Old School (Jono McLeod, 2022)

Beyond The Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos, 2010)

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller, 2015)

Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg, 2023)

Murina (Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic, 2021)

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022)

Doubt (John Patrick Shanley, 2007)

Enys Men (Mark Jenkin, 2022)

Bully (Larry Clark, 2001)

My King (Maïwenn, 2015)

Festen (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998)

Marina Abramovic & Ulay: No Predicted End (Kasper Bech Dyg, 2022)

Elles (Małgośka Szumowska, 2011)

Poison Ivy (Katt Shea, 1992)

ear for eye (debbie tucker green, 2021)

Spring Blossom (Suzanne Lindon, 2020)

God's Creatures (Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, 2023)

I Blame Society (Gillian Wallace Horvat, 2020)

Bama Rush (Rachel Fleit, 2023)

Is This Fate? (Helga Reidemeister, 1979)

Paris 5:59: Théo & Hugo (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2016)

Madeline's Madeline (Josephine Decker, 2018)

The Strays (Nathaniel Martello-White, 2023)

Here Is Always Somewhere Else (René Daalder, 2007)

The Weather Underground (Sam Green and Bill Siegel, 2002)

American Revolution 2 (Mike Gray, 1969)

Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King, 2021)

Underground (Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson, and Haskell Wexler, 1976)

Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022)

Baby Ruby (Bess Wohl, 2022)

Welcome to Me (Shira Piven, 2014)

Clock (Alexis Jacknow, 2023)

Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan, 2023)

Blue Jean (Georgia Oakley, 2022)

Soft & Quiet (Beth de Araújo, 2022)

Jesus' Son (Alison Maclean, 1999)

The Rehearsal (Alison Maclean, 2016)

Violent Playground (Basil Dearden, 1958)

Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)

A Banquet (Ruth Paxton, 2021)

Jagged Mind (Kelley Kali, 2023)

The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)

Good Boy (Viljar Bøe, 2023)

Sanctuary (Zachary Wigon, 2022)

Little Girl (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2020)

Séance on a Wet Afternoon (Bryan Forbes, 1964)

Massacre at Central High (Rene Daalder, 1976)

Summer of Soul (Amir "Questlove" Thompson, 2021)

Bad Things (Stewart Thorndike, 2023)

Still (Takashi Doscher , 2018)

Lake Mungo (Joel Anderson, 2008)

The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988)

The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring (Erin Lee Carr, 2023)

Giants and Toys (Yasuzo Masumura, 1958)

Spoonful of Sugar (Mercedes Bryce Morgan, 2022)

Double Lover (François Ozon , 2017)

Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)

Bodies Bodies Bodies (Halina Reijn, 2022)

Don't Call Me Son (Anna Muylaert, 2016)

Great Freedom (Sebastian Meise, 2021)

Mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017)

The Mind of Mr. Soames (Alan Cooke, 1970)

The Bloody Child (Nina Menkes, 1996)

Bunker (Jenny Perlin, 2021)

Polytechnique (Denis Villeneuve, 2009)

Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America (Brian Knappenberger, 2023)

The Woodsman (Nicole Kassell, 2004)

Giant Little Ones (Keith Behrman, 2018)

The Killing of a Sacred Deer(Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017)

Nineteen Eighty-Four (Michael Radford, 1984)

Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)

Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé (Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, 2023)

May December (Todd Haynes, 2023)

Free Chol Soo Lee (Julie Ha and Eugene Yi, 2022)

Girl (Lukas Dhont, 2018)

Queen of Hearts (May el-Toukhy, 2019)

Streetwise (Martin Bell, 1984)

System Crasher (Nora Fingscheidt, 2019)

Burden (Richard Dewey and Timothy Marrinan, 2016)

As Above, So Below (Larry Clark, 1973)

The Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000)

Run Rabbit Run (Daina Reid, 2023)

Subject  (Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall, 2022)

Earth Mama (Savanah Leaf, 2023)

Woodshock (Kate Mulleavy and Laura Mulleavy, 2017)

Swept Away (Lina Wertmüller, 1974)

Meadowland (Reed Morano, 2015)

Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (Nina Menkes, 2022)

La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)

Zola (Janicza Bravo, 2021)

The Starling Girl (Laurel Parmet, 2023)

Night Comes On (Jordana Spiro, 2018)

Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)

[jackiedaytona]

favorite horror movies i watched for the first time in 2023

from left to right, top to bottom (unranked): Skinamarink The Exorcist III They Live Cobweb Final Destination 3 Talk To Me Saw X Elvira: Mistress of the Dark Nightbreed

[lcatala]

My top 6 movies discovered in 2023

I watched 52 new-to-me movies in 2023. Not nearly enough , as I could only find 6 movies that stood out sufficiently to be worthy of a personal top, in what was otherwise a pretty meh year — yes I'm a picky watcher — and yeah The Boy and The Heron didn't make the top, you can read the long rambling I wrote about it if you want to know why; I haven't watched Barbie, Oppenheimer or the Super Mario Bros. Movie, and haven't watched any Marvel-related movie since 2015.

6: Nimona (2023)

I didn't really expect to like the animated adaptation of N. D. Stevenson's comic, and I went in reluctantly, only because a lot of people who seemed trustworthy recommended it. Despite having some of the flaws I've come to expect in modern 3D animation, this was a very good surprise. You can read my detailed review here.

5: Suzume (2022)

The plot of Suzume stays very much within the bounds of the "modern artsy anime film", with a rather predictable 3+1 acts structure and an exploration of themes and human interactions which has some subtlety and nuance but overall stays very safe and on-the-surface. Nothing offensive, but nothing truly groundbreaking either.

But.

Suzume had, by far, the best animation of any movie I've seen this year. This movie is an absoluteely beautiful, every-frame-a-painting kind of deal. If I was to rank every animated I've ever seen solely by the quality of their animation, Suzume would easily be in the top 10.

4: Cape Fear (1962)

American cinema achieved maturity during the New Hollywood era that started in the late 1960s, marking a shift toward more naturalistic and more adult filmmaking and themes. But there were a few notable precursors before that.

The most famous of those is of course Psycho (altho tellingly, it was from a British director). But Cape Fear followed close behind, and is another example of an early 60s movie which you don't expect to be this dark and this raw, starring an absolutely get-under-your-skin-terrifying Robert Mitchum — if you thought he was creepy in The Night of the Hunter, you haven't seen nothing yet…

3: The Outwaters (2022)

This was the biggest surprise of the year, watched the same day it was recommended to me, having heard absolutely nothing about it before that (I didn't even know this movie existed). I got treated to a no-budget yet beautifully-shot found-footage horror movie — in fact the best found-footage movie I have ever seen, with a lot of attention put toward making the gimmick plausible, making the characters realistic and likeable, making this look like the kind of actual footage you'd find on a personal camera — while also having amazingly beautiful cinematography — all while slowly building up the tension.

Because that's just the first half.

Oh yeah, it's one of these horror movies in which you think you know where the story is going, and then second half just explodes in your face and becomes completely, utterly batshit insane. This is on par with Men (2022) for how weird and fucked up the climax is. Don't expect any kind of explanation or closure here, the second half of this movie turns into one of the most fucked up and bizzare horror movies you'll ever see.

2: Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Yeah so this one was a surprise late-year hit for everyone, not just me. First live-action Japanese Godzilla film in 7 years, with rather tempered expectations — we all knew that Shin Godzilla was an odd one out, that the average Japanese Godzilla movie is not like that, that we shouldn't expect this kind of quality on a regular basis.

Well we played ourselves.

This was incredibly well made as a blockbuster — Japanese cinema has completely caught up on American cinema, for a fraction of the budgets — one of the best Godzilla movies ever made from an action and visuals point of view, and a reminder that Godzilla, as a character, can also be scary, a terrifying incarnation of destruction and disaster.

But somehow this also managed to be a powerful and well filmed drama — no lazy endless shot/reverse shot dialogues here, a lot effort is put into framing choices, blocking… — a movie that actually touches on difficult questions and goes against the message of many other war or action blockbusters.

When so many stories glorify the idea of sacrifying your life for a greater cause, here's one movie that says "hey maybe expecting people to sacrifice their life for your cause is actually pretty fucked up, and maybe it's actually better to choose to live for the sake of your loved ones than to die for the sake of your own pride". Yeah a Japanese movie is saying that, a Godzilla movie is saying that.

1: Skinamarink (2022)

So, speaking of low-budget independent horror, back in 2022 I had foolishly overlooked Skinamarink. I had vaguely heard that it was good, but no particular detail was mentioned that would have picked my interest, and the poster looked fairly generic, so I skipped it, even tho I should have been more intrigued — 2022 was already shaping up to be a really good year for horror films…

Skinamarink was a tough proposition from the get go, in the "experimental" kind of tough: an entire film made in the analog horror genre — usually short videos made to ressemble old media from the 80s and 90s, advertisements, warning messages, weather channels, documentaries and informercials, with a disturbing twist; a format usually made of short segments. Trying to tell a film-length story in that fashion is an entirely different exercise, but that's fine, I've sat thru Begotten (1989), I can do this.

Right away, this is not framed like a movie: it's more as if someone had negligently left an old camera on the floor — but this is not even found-footage, there is no camera in-story, we just happen to be seeing this world thru stolen, furtive points of view. The image is grainy, the sound is bad quality (subtitles are provided), the frames are often askew, you never even see the actors' faces. We get no narration, no exposition, just a succession of disjointed scenes that slowly form a story.

This shouldn't work. And for many people, this will not work. Most will turn this off not even 5 minutes in. But if you're among the exceptions, then howdy does it work. The format is not a gimmick at all — it's completely in service of the story. The grainy image, the low quality sound prey on your pattern recognition, never quite certain if something is there or not; the framing by a "forgotten" camera contributes to make the atmosphere hyper-real in its intimacy, yet alienating and uncanny.

The director of Skinamarink deals with one very specific topic: nightmares. Not the idea of nightmares, not the heightened nightmares of fiction, but the literal nightmares that real people have; he started by making short videos representing common nightmares that people would tell him about. When it came time to make a full-length feature film, he kept the same approach. Skinamarink doesn't really use any of the classic themes or structures of horror movies; it largely ignores that folklore and instead focuses on deep childhood fears, the kind of stuff your mind used to conjure up long ago and that you have forgotten but not erased from your brain.

If you manage to enter into this very peculiar format, this very unusual and seemingly disjointed way to tell a story, and if you identify with the kind of fear material the movie is drawing on, this is a truly scary experience. Not really in a jump scare or suspense way, more like a deeply haunting and unsettling atmosphere, a strong ambient uncanniness where things are almost normal but just broken enough to give you a constant feeling of unpleasantness, of wanting to run the hell out of here while being trapped, a sense of horrible lurking threat while having nothing concrete to fight against or protect yourself from.

Of course, this isn't exactly a fun experience. This is very, very intense, I'm talking Antichrist-levels of playing with your nerves, and the story, as simple as it is, is tragically harrowing and cruel — you're essentially watching two young children getting psychologically (and eventually physically) tortured by a sadistic, unseen entity for a hundred minutes.

It's hard to recommend, and yet recommendations is how this movie ended up grossing 2 millions on a 15k budget — promotion included ! Most people actually didn't like the movie, but those who liked it liked it so much they can't shut up about it (case in point!) It's one of those horror movies that completely break the boundaries of the genre and do something truly new and unique. It's what horror should be for: imagination gone wild, format-breaking fantasy, and realism thrown out of the window.

[virtual-minotaur]

Hallways empty.