Skinamarink

  Skinamarink is an experimental Canadian horror movie about a couple of very young siblings (one of them four, the other six, at a guess) who awake one day in their home to find that their father's disappeared... and so have all the windows and the door outside. They weather out the weirdness by camping out in the living room with their favorite toys while a VHS keeps looping through ancient (and public domain) cartoons. Then something starts playing around with them.

 I doubt I'd even have heard about it, except that it captured some people's imagination and became a minor viral hit; made for $15k and with no marketing whatsoever, it took two million in cinemas; hell, that such a nakedly uncommercial movie made it to the big screen in the first place is some kind of achievement.

 It's an unrelentingly oblique movie; The camera always faces away from any action, focusing on, say, an empty stretch of wall while you piece together what's happening from noises, how the scene is lit, and maybe, if you're lucky, some movement at the edge of the frame. That's when things are actually happening; most of the time, nothing is, and you're literally watching dry paint.
 There's a further layer of obfuscation in the heavy grain filter applied to every scene, mimicking the lossy video of yesteryear - but this goes a whole lot further than retro movies like Christmas Bloody Christmas; every frame is saturated with static and darkness (no windows, remember?) to the point where it makes it hard to make things out, making it seem very likely that something is going to coalesce at any moment from the background. Scenes are mostly static (ha!) and drawn out, but others mimic the young protagonists' point of view.

Sometimes it reminded me of how you never get to see the adults' heads in Peanuts.

 A movie that's more about questions than answers, that perversely makes you have to parse out what's happening in even the most mundane scenes, and that stretches tension with no payoff on purpose... I get why it became a sort of viral sensation, why people would want to check it out. Hell, I did, as soon as I saw it on Shudder.

 ...It put me to sleep within thirty minutes.
 There'll be people more in tune with its batty wavelength out there, I'm sure, but I found it a chore to sit through, even with a running time of a hundred minutes, cut into two installments (because I really did fall asleep). There's just not enough of anything here.

 The movie's tactics are pretty blatant - get viewers engaged by making them have to work out what's going on, draw out tension by hiding it, trying to dig its hooks in their imagination, and every huge now and then fire off a jump scare or a snippet of... well, let's call it plot, but really it's more of a situation. 
 It is remarkably creepy, and it does do a good job of capturing pre-teen memories of being up way past your bedtime. But I found the whole thing weirdly artless and almost pedestrian, relying on very basic, universally creepy elements to do its work for it. I appreciated what it was going for, but it, to put it bluntly, bored me out of my skull; There are tons of shorts on the web that go for the sort of thing that movie is going for - I'm not saying they do it better (some do, some don't), but I don't see why this stands out.
 Given its microbudget I might be a lot better disposed to it if it had been half as long, but as stands I just found it tedious.

 Not that it's a complete loss: there's a couple of good (non-jump) scares, including one that's respectably cruel, and one decent joke that uses editing and context for effect. There's some mildly cool imagery towards the end, and the overall vibe is creepy enough. But it's way too meagre a showing for an hour and forty minutes.