All right let's talk about this. It's hard not to see it as something in dialogue with Blair Witch, not just for word-of-mouth and reception reasons but because it is so concerned with filming. In 1999 at the cusp of The Internet about nine years before the first smartphone Blair Witch asked "how far are we willing to carry our cameras for this". Now we have surveillance devices in multiple rooms and on our person almost constantly, so Skinamarink looks back at 1995 and decides the cameras didn't need to be carried. They were just there, and sometimes we were the camera, during the handful of PS2 survival horror-like POV shots in that mode. (Actually, think of the way POV has become detached from its original meaning among a generation trained to see themselves as always on camera: every shot is something's point of view.) Analog film effects provide the spotty patina of degrading memory (the work of The Caretaker, which zoomers and younger have decided is cursed or something, is demonstrative here). Technology rots, says this film, and we rot with it. The opaque or low key hostile or outright boring shot compositions suggest the ways that memories from childhood/last night's dream acquire this uncanny sense that we weren't looking at that scene right, we couldn't turn our head around for some reason, that we're forgetting one key detail, etc.
Poltergeist is here too, of course. The suburban nightmare of the home invaded by the haunted television. But whereas the TV in poltergeist was a communicative medium, a portal that connected worlds, the TV in Skinamarink is smugly impermeable. It plays public domain cartoons, the hyperanimated puzzlement and odd menace of Fleischer work operating as the kernel of the real for the whole project. This movie is like a cartoon about mice sneaking around a house at night trying to do something adorable but occasionally the mice go quiet because a human wakes up and dodders around and they never speak and we never see their faces. Except the movie is only those scenes with the people, and the cute animals have gone missing. A cartoon misremembered, repeated, misremembered worse. More poltergeist: Objects and furniture appear magnetized to the walls and ceiling, lots of Lego.
The children play with Lego, building and rebuilding in front of their TV and the thing in the house plays them—removing doors, windows, toilets, parents—on the other side of our screen. If there's something I find deeply interesting in all this it's that: how the thing tormenting them is also just an echo of them, which is also a reflection of us. It wants to play, it tells the boy, and it can do anything, speaking in much the same self-serious childlike way the boy and his sister speak to one another. In a Funny Games moment near the end it lets the boy call 911, and the operator promises adults will be there soon, but oh, what's this? The phone was just a toy. This is when it tells him it can do anything. It's a child, too, but a cruel one. Maybe something akin to the malign artificial intelligence AM in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (indeed, it removes the girl's mouth for not playing her part correctly). The song alluded to by the title evokes the key moment of contrast to all this, when in the midst of the terror as they sleep downstairs the first night after their dad disappears the girl confidently says to her brother "I love you", and later that moment's dark echo when the faceless remnant of their mother tells her "we love you both very much".
Notably for all the 1995 feelings the movie could not have happened without the internet, and I don't just mean the crowdfunding. The creator strung together recurrent motifs in nightmares submitted to a YouTube channel and in that it shows the Mark of the Algorithm in logic if not in actuality. Traditional wisdom is that other people's dreams are boring, so how much you like this movie will depend on how much you like that dream logic, that atmosphere, or how immediate or compelling you find it. But on top of that, there's something here of the logic of SCP, creepypasta, tiktok virality, of the moment-image of it all going Wrong that can be sliced out of time and made into a gif because it seems to condense some archetypal dread from the collective unconscious, the sense that there's just some brute Machine out there underneath all our thoughts trying to pattern-seek its way to the jump scare that finally does us all in. Like a sibling who won't stop telling the ghost story when we ask them to.
