On Halloween I watched Skinamarink, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie so focused on the specific fears of childhood: the arbitrariness of the world, the inscrutability of adults, and, most of all, the dark. If you can call to mind the fear that comes with being alone in your dark, silent house in the middle of the night, and suddenly hearing a noise that you can’t identify—especially if you can take away the adult voice in your brain that there’s really nothing to be afraid of—then you’ve got the vibe of this movie. I do definitely see where the criticisms are coming from. It’s not a long movie, but I do think some shots could have been a little more tightly edited. The director has a lot of trust that the audience will figure out what the characters are doing from sound cues and indirect shots, but I don’t know that things are always as clear as he means them to be. There’s a decision to subtitle some barely-intelligible lines and not others, when I felt that I was still missing more dialogue than I wanted to. Still, if you’re in the mood for a horror movie that is willing to take its time with creeping dread, and if you think things can be scarier if left implied rather than shown directly, then I think Skinamarink delivers.