By the end I was more bored than frightened.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 1, 2023

It’s an unsettling Rorschach test with a haunting ending that will settle in the pit of your stomach like a stone. But it can be a polarizing experience that pushes the limits of patience.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 28, 2023

Taps into a primal fear of a child waking up in the night finding the things they take comfort (home, toys, cartoons) twisted into something nightmarish in the dark.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 20, 2023

It's only January, but this might be the most divisive horror movie of 2023 if people actually go see it. I might hate it myself; it's kind of hard to tell.

| Jan 18, 2023

The images appear to be the tip of an iceberg, but there’s no iceberg beneath them.

| Jan 18, 2023

As impressive as this experiment in terror can be, it’s too sparse to earn its runtime.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 17, 2023

Skinamarink is as hair-raising as it is boring, which doesn’t feel like a failure so much as the goal of this micro-budget effort.

| Jan 13, 2023

Skinamarink, for all its dreaminess, is a successful horror film: Like many of the genre’s greatest examples, it has a sense of discovery and terrifying wonder.

| Jan 13, 2023

A major debut from a filmmaker who is willing to tell horror stories in a way that's both different for the genre and yet also like something we’ve all experienced before.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 13, 2023

Skinamarink is mostly build and little reward, like a rollercoaster that climbs the big hill but cuts out just before going over the top. But there's plenty of promise in that ascension...

| Original Score: B- | Jan 13, 2023

It seems to exist in the liminal space between awake and asleep, expertly capturing the way the mind plays tricks on you over a restless night spent studying shadows and shuddering at every stray sound.

| Jan 12, 2023

A one-of-a-kind film that re-creates the sensation of being very young and essentially powerless, unable even to articulate why everything feels so … wrong.

| Jan 12, 2023

Ingeniously evoking a child’s response to the inexplicable, “Skinamarink” sways on the border between dreaming and wakefulness, a movie as difficult to penetrate as it is to forget.

| Jan 12, 2023

A mishmash of Creepypasta aesthetics captured in a cerulean-and-violet haze marred by carefully inserted scratches, and borderline inaudible ASMR rumblings complemented by hisses and pops. For 100 minutes.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 12, 2023

It’s a low-fi rumination on inexplicable and gradually more threatening loneliness — the sort of childhood trauma typically explained to death by horror movies less interesting than this one.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 11, 2023

It’s the opposite of “elevated horror,” whatever that means; it’s two feet above the carpet and deathly allergic to metaphor. It’s a “Backrooms” twist on being 4 years old, sensing that something is terribly wrong.

| Original Score: B | Jan 11, 2023

Skinamarink is, at its heart, firmly and gleefully experimental, and that means leaving more traditional forms of narrative arc building behind in favor of a darker, more mercurial approach.

| Original Score: A | Jan 11, 2023

Quiet horror at its finest. Skinamarink isn’t scary because of what it depicts. It’s scary because it already knows that our imagination will do half of the work.

| Jan 10, 2023

I found “Skinamarink” to be terrifying, but it’s a film that asks for (and rewards) patience... if you go with it, you may feel that you’ve touched the uncanny.

| Jan 10, 2023

Skinamarink is confidently made, and certain upside-down images are especially creepy, but its spell is broken by its sheer, ungodly slowness, which springs from a paucity of ideas.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 8, 2023