Skinamarink Explained - A Forgotten Nightmare

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I absolutely adore the detail of Kevin not knowing exactly what to do to comfort his sister so he thinks about what makes him happy and gets her juice.

the line "can we watch something happy?" made me so incredibly sad, because it felt more like a sign that he has given up and felt exhausted by the constant dread that they both faced. it sounds like something someone would say when they're at the brink of giving up everything entirely and just want a sliver of hope, even the tiniest bit, to feel something.

The part that really gets me is whenever the blood keeps splattering into the carpet. Seeing that a child is subjected to endless torture, and the one thing that she utters while we see her go through this is “mommy”. That just broke my heart in a way that no other horror movie has. Seeing a child go through so much pain and fear, and seeing her beg for one of the few people that made her feel safe is just so utterly terrifying.

Walking around your house in the dark as a kid is the most uncomfortable thing to do. You know it's your house, but you don't at the same time.

I really felt like this was about child abuse. Dad's gone. Doors gone. Then toilets gone. But first the phone call. The head injury. Kevin keeps "hurting himself" the eye. And also how the voice is like a guardian but also a tormentor when the toilet disappeared it really solidified this in my head because of horror stories where kids are abused and kept from using facilities. And locked away for let's say....572 days.

Reminds me of that one Jack Stauber lyric from Nurpo:
“He speaks of what adults can’t remember and children haven’t the words to describe.”
You can never really remember how terrified you were as a child sometimes. At least not truly.

As soon as I finished watching this movie I immediately knew that
A. It's one of the best original concepts for a horror movie in a very long time
and B. So, so many people are going to HATE this movie and it's going to get dragged so hard online
Say what you will about Skinamarink, but it is a gosh dang MASTER CLASS in "Show Don't Tell". Just like you used to do as a kid alone at night in your dark bedroom unable to sleep, watching all the dark corners and inside your closet, you let your imagination fill in the gaps. What a genius move by a genius director! And on a budget of 15k no less!

the fact that you messaged the creator to ask if it was okay is so wholesome

I was not abused or neglected as a child and I had gruesome, horrifying nightmares (even involving family members, like in this movie). Kids have some seriously freaky dreams; I think their fear manifests way differently in their dreams than it does for adults.

i watched skinamarink with subtitles, and i think the implication is that there are many instances of kaylee and kevin attempting to turn the lights on, but they no longer work. specifically in the kitchen at one point, you can hear the light switch clicking repeatedly, and nothing happens. i think it was the upstairs lights/staircase lights that first stopped working, which explains the flashlights.

I think this is representative of an abusive and manipulative mother. She has the dad trapped emotionally, so he nor the kids can leave. She tries to keep them loyal by telling them she and their father loves them, but in fact she takes out her anger on the kids.
In these children's minds the mother is a "monster". Kaylee doesn't want to talk about their mother and has clearly understood how horrible their mother is, while Kevin still thinks she'll stop.

This is the first horror video in a LONG time that made me actually feel tense and scared. I’m in my 20s and haven’t been this frightened by something

As someone who works at a movie theater, let me just say that not a single person who has seen the movie has walked out happy

I did skip ahead and with that in mind the scariest part for me was when the dad asked Kaylee to look under the bed
There's nothing worse than a parent who is both someone you love but also someone you are compelled to obey ordering you to do something frightening for seemingly no reason

29:45 I had night terrors as a kid, and they almost always involved me "waking up" from a nightmare in my room but my room felt fundamentally different and fundamentally _wrong._ That moment of thinking I'd woken up from a bad dream, thinking I was awake in my room but my room wasn't right, _that_ was the terror.

I love the way the "monster" is depicted because when I was little I wasn't scared of "boogyman" or clowns or ghosts or anything like that. But the fear was still there. Especially when I couldn't sleep.

There is nothing that could've broken my heart more, and yet still filled me with weird hope, than Kevin saying "Can we watch something happy?"

I grew up with a mother who had severe mental health issues + alcoholism, and the moments of "can we watch something happy" or distracting your sibling by playing with toys or even simply having your parent tell you they love you before something HORRIBLE happens hits really close to home. this movie looks fantastic and very well done.
EDIT: wanted to add a bit about the phone. a lot of times, CPS can only do so much in abuse situations. seeing the phone go from a phone to a children's toy and then back to a demon definitely shows how not only can the phone, a source of protection, can be made absolutely useless, but also can be used against you--I have no doubt that calling the police probably had severe repercussions for him.

A trailer trash couple moved into the apartment beneath me for about eight months. They had two young boys and a newborn baby. They where constantly yelling, screaming at their kids, threatening to beat them, etc. Me and my neighbor reported them to CPS multiple times and nothing happened. Eventually the landlord told them they needed to move out because they had trashed the place. There where holes in the walls/doors, mountains of trash piled up everywhere, tons of bugs and roaches. I think about those three young kids all the time. Hell is real, and it's all around us. Its a place that the most vulnerable people in our world know all too well, they are trapped in it every day, and even though they live in the same physical space we do, they can't escape it.

Tbh, as someone with severe childhood trauma caused by my mother, I relate to the narrative of Skinamarink on a core level. My mother would scare me at night like this, try to silence my crying with threats, and prevent me from getting out through the windows or doors. I'd ask my sister to watch something happy just to escape the situation. To me, this movie makes sense a lot.

anyone who suffers from childhood trauma will insantly understand what this movie is trying to do

It really encapsulates how helpless you feel as a child where you don’t understand what’s happening, you mostly “do as you’re told” even if you don’t know the person directing you, you can’t reach things and you don’t know how to use things, you don’t know the severity of situations, I mean, I think it perfectly captures it

As someone who grew up with child abuse, this definitely invokes that feeling of fear I had. I'm actually crying a little

My very half baked theory is that maybe it's about post-partum depression and the abuse/neglect/abandonment that comes from it. Post-partum depression can be a terrifying thing, especially when psychosis is involved, and could possibly explain some things in this movie.
Anyway, I haven't even seen Skinamarink. I came to this conclusion by watching this video! Let me know what you guys think!

This movie isn’t for everyone, but I found it to be the perfect visual representation for what it’s like to have a nightmare as a child. You are alone. Helpless. And it feels like you’ll never leave. It’s incredible.

I like to think that the entity, bored after all the torture, let him go, and the door and face at the end were partially meant to symbolize what Kevin is left with: an empty history, and a future he must walk into with nothing but the trauma and pain he experienced in that house

My interpretation of this movie is that of a mother being afflicted by post-partum depression and post-partum psychosis, slowly becoming abusive. Kevin's mind making sense of the trauma and abuse by imagining his mother as a literal monster. The windows and doors disappearing could be the mom locking the doors and windows to prevent them from escaping.

I figured the mom had died before the movie starts. It seemed like the dad was taking care of both kids by himself. The line 'i dont want to talk about mom' reminds me of a young kid unable to process their mother is gone

The idea that someone who (in their mind) loves you can still with their actions, through accident or intent, (literally in the case of this film, figuratively in real life) trap you in an endless cycle of torture is just about the only subject matter in horror that can truly frighten me.

I’ve written about this recurring nightmare that I had as a child but the windows didn’t actually disappear, I would half wake up in random trap houses with one my parents having dragged me along with them to get their fix after giving me “medicine” to make me sleep. So the windows were boarded up in said trap houses, toilets were missing, there wasn’t electricity, etc. My first memory of this was at age 4. I caught on to what was going on at age 6 and then I’d usually get left home alone with my baby brother. I made his bottles from the age of 6 so he’d stop crying and I changed his diaper, clothing and gave us a bath every few days. Sorry for over sharing

The concept of innocent children being trapped in an infinite loop of torture because of a parent's mistake is impossibly upsetting. Even worse when you realize it can very easily be seen as a number of real life allegories.

any horror work that preys on our natural fear can't help but get under your skin. that's why i love analogue horror, it captures the fear of the unknown and the ordinary better than any other horror medium, and skinamarink might be the best example of this

I love the little detail with Kevin bringing his sister the juice... It just feels so authentic and absolutely like something I would've done for someone when I was little.

as a kid I used to be convinced that if I didn't hide under the covers when I went to bed, then the grim reaper or some kind of undead ghoul would come out of my closet and kill me. this is definitely reawakening that fear lol. Bravo to everyone who made this film

The scene with Kevin with the knife and hearing him cry made me so upset and want to go run upstairs and cuddle my baby brother who just turned 5. This movie is very effective at making you feel helpless and desperate to do something if you really let it pull you in.

I interpreted the ending of the entity showing itself as a response to Kevin asking to watch something happy, like a statement that it was feeling great joy from toying with him like this. Left a sick feeling in my gut :')

Just a personal point: the way the mother talks about how she loves them is exactly the tone my father had when he said goodbye before he, uh, Skinamarinked himself. Very eerie

The fact that no one can help these children is going to make me cry
Edit: I am crying

I feel like addiction plays some part in the sinister nature of the creature/entity. The looping being a recurring theme and addiction being a constant cycle would make sense. Maybe the mother/creature she becomes was a result of an addiction. This could easily bleed into the abusive and neglectful themes that show up as well. This film could be the result of a woman who tore her family apart and the demons she created in doing so.

This movie feels like hallucinations you would have at age 7-4 at a middle of the night. Your creativity is so high you can imagine anything and it can fear you, so you cope with the light of the television and toys. Truly a underrated masterpiece.
Scared the living hell out of me.
Felt like all of my fears combined into one in one movie.

Me and my friend watched this in an old amc, we were the only ones there. After we finished the movie, we joked that we'd been transported into another dimension, but it really did kinda feel that way. Plus we live in Indiana, and so the drive home in the dark with the strange urban-suburban-country layouts definitely didn't help.

An interesting detail is when Kevin tries to call the police, but the monster turns it into a play telephone. It’s very reminiscent of being in an abusive household and being silenced by new, shiny things.

I’m in my mid 20s and I have watched a lot of horror in the past 10-15 years. Not a lot of horror movies actually scare me at this point. But then I come across creators like Kyle and you can just tell that this is someone who is passionate about the art of movies, visual storytelling and horror. It is a rare find and I admire the work 🎉

I went through alot of abuse as a child and this movie reminded me SO much of it. They did an amazing job with portraying it in this manner.

Watching this by myself in the dark was one of the most intense, blistering horror experiences I've ever had

Usually I don't like horror that targets children, for it always seems needlessly cruel and exploitive, but when it's done with the intention of showing fear and terror that only the perspective of someone so young, innocent, and ignorant can have, that's when it works better.

when u watch the movie through the perspective of kids trapped in an abusive household with drug addicted parents it becomes more depressing that scary

When it’s happening to adults it’s scary. When it’s happening to kids it’s heart breaking.

i’m an absolute horror junkie and nothing turns me away, but this film genuinely disturbed me. the way it perfectly conveys child abuse and childhood trauma and the feeling of being alone and trapped without actually showing it outright scares me shitless. this movie is INCREDIBLE

In regards to your story -- I'm a psychology major, and I was fascinated by the way you retold your story! You mentioned "Trauma" is a strong word, (and it is), and there's 2 points I wanna make in regards to that:
1. Typically nowadays when we talk about "Trauma" as a child, we don't use that word because of the weight it carries. We nowadays call it an "ACE" -- an 'Adverse Childhood Experience' -- because the word "trauma" is so often referred to with extreme abuse. Abuse=/ trauma all the time. An adverse childhood experience is, by definition, anything that's unusual in childhood that the person carries with them that alters the way they think/perceive the world around them. ACEs can be small -- like your story, for example, where the 'effect' it had on you was realizing you were vulnerable -- or they can be large, such as losing a parent early on . ACEs are not always abuse-focused (although they CAN be, any typically in those cases 'trauma' can be used). ACEs aren't always a *really bad thing*. Don't get me wrong, they CAN be, but they also could do things like make a child grow up faster than they need to. ACEs are also not always indicative of underlying mental health conditions ( -- and, for the record, neither is trauma).
I'm wondering if you're so hesitant to call it 'trauma' due to that *connotation* of the word, rather than what the word actually means in psychology. I would definitely call it an ACE, since it emotionally impacted you so hard. That experience alone doesn't make your childhood bad, doesn't make your parents bad, doesn't make you mentally ill or anything of the sort.
2. The word 'trauma's connotation is really frustrating for both therapists and researchers. We end up having therapy patients who absolutely refuse to call what they experienced 'trauma' when it undoubtedly is. This is difficult. People (ESPECIALLY grown ass adults) will be like "people nowadays are calling EVERYTHING trauma!!" without fully understanding what the field of psychology is referencing when it says the word.
Its kind of like the difference between a 'theory theory' and a 'scientific theory'. People who don't know the difference between common usage of the word and actual precise usage will think that people are simply making a mountain out of a molehill or trying to talk bad about their parents.
That's essentially *why* psychologists have to adopt this new term/new language, so that when we talk to others, we can accurately say what it means.
idk if that was helpful or at the very least interesting. Hope anybody who read learned something!

This movie reminded me of how I felt about bedtime and the dark.
When I was 8, I had a classmate who was checking out a zombie book with hyperrealistic imagery, which slowly disturbed me the more I looked at it. Eventually, I had asked this classmate to turn the cover away from me and he did, until a friend snatched it and began chasing me with it. Well, as you'd expect, I had a nightmare that night from the scary imagery, but I hallucinate in the pitch black after nightmares and this was before we had a nightlight in my brother's and I's shared room. I woke up to the pitch black in my bed, but then I saw it, slowly fading into sight, was a blurry face that the more I focused on, the more I could see the detail. It got closer, and closer. I tried waking up my little brother but he didn't budge, still very asleep. I started to hyperventilate, crying as the undead, warped face remained right infront of mine no matter where I looked. I tried calling for my mom and stepdad, but no one answered. I tried to hide my face into the pillows, something that usually worked, but I almost felt it's presence. Eventually, I fainted from fear.
Every night until I was 12 years old, I never felt safe in my room at night, I always felt watched, would always face my wall, tensed up until my entire body ached before I gotten the courage to look into my dark room, and when I recognized the light from under my bedroom door, I booked it out and would hide in the bathroom for hours. At 12 years old, my bio father gave us a night light (Because our mom and stepdad refused to get one) and I hadn't had an issue since.

As a kid who had ... To put it simply, a short childhood .. This movie just- .. Hits something in my brain. I would wake up to a quiet and lonely house more often than not, as both my parents had to work for us to be able to live. Even during the daytime it was always so .. Eerie. Obviously after a while I got used to it .. But the feeling never fully went away. This only got worse when my parents split up and my little brother and I constantly juggled between houses.
This movie manages to tap into the anxiety of a child by themselves, even if they have a sibling there. It reminds me of the feeling when your parent takes longer to come home than usual and you're just .. Sitting there, wondering if when you told them "I love you" when they left for work is the last words you ever told them.
Safe to say, this movie fucked me up, and I'm going to rewatch it in the near future

I grew up in a extremely broken home with my sister thats a few year older than me, this captured the horror and trauma of neglect and being forgotten. I cannot tell you how much this movie put me back into my past. This movie was literally my childhood

I’ve never been in a theater so dead silent as when I saw this film. The tension was insane, I felt like everyone in the room was holding their breath

Just want to say how glad I am how you laid out what happened in clear detail, because it felt a lot more cohesive than when I watched it last night! The experience of watching was like meditating in a nightmare, just transfixed by this pure dread I felt for nearly two hours with purposefully-confusing camera angles and noises. What an effective film.

Oh man I've totally had that "shadow in the corner of the room" moment when I was a kid. I woke up one night and in my closet (which had no door) was a pair of glowing green eyes and what appeared to be teeth. I froze. I couldn't tell if it was blinking or not because the glow wasn't that bright it was feint but definitely green. Eventually I worked up the courage to turn a light on and its was my Monster Face toy. Known to the generation after me as the Goosebumps Monster Head Maker I just found out.

I gotta say, this movie evokes a terror in me that I’ve only ever felt while trapped in a house with my raging abusive mother, being unable to call my father for help because my mother had my cellphone and she could pick up the landline if I tried to call from that. I’m amazed that a film can evoke such a feeling, and while (as a fan of horror and experimental films) I love this movie, I can safely say that I never want to watch it ever again
Edit: I’m writing this comment before watching the analysis or reading through the comments section.

this was the first time I wanted to cover my eyes watching a horror movie. I felt like this movie toyed with me the same way it toyed with Kevin and the more I found about this movie, the worse and more terrifying it became. It's not like other horror movies that have action and suspense, this one is quiet and it gets you out of nowhere.

As a kid some nights I'd hear some noise in the house and just, freeze, as if any sound or movement would alert it to my presence and that'd be the end of me. I couldn't tell you what that "it" was, I just knew my life depended on it not finding me.
Watching this movie put me back in that headspace. I was frozen the entire time.

In my honest opinion, feeling that you're not safe in a place where you're supposed to feel safe and secure is one of the worst feelings that you could experience. Home is a place where you're supposed to feel as if nothing can harm you, but if you do, then something is horribly- *horribly* wrong.

This movie reminded me of the fears of my childhood I had completely forgot about. Like evil sorts of fears. Waking up in the middle of the night, the house being off, everything being wrong, your parents being gone sort of fears. It’s the fear of darkness. I can see why it’s so divisive since I think people get that or they don’t. For me it reminded me of something so ancient, primal and evil that I really shook me. It momentarily gave me back the fear of the dark, years after I completely stopped experiencing it.

As a kid, I had a repeating nightmare that struck several times over years and each time it was the most paralyzing terror ever, I was actually paralyzed in fear only seeing the monster in pitch dark, in my own house. So I had this nightmare again and again, until one time I was telling myself in the dream I had to do something, I couldn’t just be stuck in fear anymore. And from there it actually turned into a sequence of me in my kitchen actually getting up and defeating the monster, it’s still dark but now rather than pitch black there’s flashing lights and effects, like a tv show or game. Since then, I have never had that nightmare again.
This just made me think of that.

I have to say, as a CSA survivor, this film perfectly describes how it feels; like you’re stuck in an unclean, twisted version of what childhood should be and even when you’re an adult, you’re somehow still there

I watched skinamarink recently and it made me genuinely sob on my couch for like 30 minutes. When I was younger my mom was an alcoholic and my dad left and my older brother was usually at his friends house; so I was often home alone. This movie made me remember what it was like to walk up and down the hallways and check any room for anyone in my family being there, climbing on the kitchen counter to try to find food, and eventually crying in the floor holding a stuffed rabbit. 11/10 film tbh made my skin crawl.

I actually just watched this today. It brings me back to being afraid of everything in my room at night. My family believes in the paranormal, so I constantly thought there were shadow people/shadow creatures everywhere. This brings me back to that in the most intense way.
The other thing that gets me is the toy phone. The clip shown at 24:40 is... unnerving. Especially because the smile reminds me of the nightmare clown sequence from Brave Little Toaster. It feels so... oddly visceral. It was the only clip to actually scare me in the movie, and only cos it was so loud.
Anyways. This was a really awesome movie, I'm def gonna watch it again.

I think the mom is alive in the beginning, tells the son that "she loves him very much" and then hangs herself in the closet. The bones breaking sound is her neck snapping. That's why the boy is seen looking up, that's why the toys float up, there's so many shots of the ceiling.
After a parents suicide, the remaining spouse will fall into a deep depression and the children suffer so much, especially if there is no outside help. I think this film is about not being able to escape the feeling of hopelessness (the doors disappear, the phone turns into a toy) after suffering a huge trauma as a child. The "demon" is a manifestation of all of that.
The kids stay up late because the father has lost control, they're neglected, toys are everywhere, the demon tells the kids to do horrible things (some kids blame themselves) and the kids say "where's dad? maybe he went with mom" alluding that the dad might have killed himself too and left them all alone.

my story is long but holy shit I had such an INCREDIBLY similar experience to your story at 26:47 that hearing yours freaked me out that someone else went through it. This was a shared experience between me, my older sister, and my younger brother.
We were probably 6-7, 8-9, and 9-10 years old playing hide and seek (just us three or us and our parents I don't quite remember) in our house and we were in our spots. I'm not clear on which parent was supposed to find us, but all I remember is that we hid for long enough that it became worrying that it was taking them so long, because for an adult, finding three children hiding in a house isn't hard to do. We knew that much.
I remember leaving my spot and going to the living room with my siblings, but I'm not sure if we decided together that we would do that. Regardless, the house just suddenly felt off. It was like gravity shifted, that's how strange it felt. I remember the way I saw my house was like if you desaturated an image, made it kind of black and white but still able to see color; that's how I experienced the unfamiliarity of it all. It was scarily quiet as well.
Collectively, we knew, and I don't know how because I don't remember of us asking about it before we came to this realization, that our parents just...vanished. Being around them for so long, we knew the 'someone's behind me and staring at me' gut feeling when we knew our parents were in the house, and could come into wherever we were at any given moment. But this time, that feeling was completely nonexistent. We didn't even have to tell each other, we just understood that due to the lack of noise and feeling of their presences, mom and dad aren't here and started looking. I don't remember feeling scared because I thought they decided to prank us and hide us, to make look for I don't remember my siblings being scared either, so they possibly thought the same.
But when we searched the house, yelling for them, we met back up with no luck. we started freaking out. We cried, we checked again, again, and again. Still no luck. We looked through the windows if they were outside, and they were not.
We decided that we'd go to our neighbor's house, so we did. We didn't even get shoes, just bolted outside and next door. The three of us knocked on their door and told them "we don't know where our parents are, can you call them?"
And then suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere, they call for us. They're outside in our driveway, walking towards us. Gravity returns, color is restored to its natural vibrancy, and nature sounds start up again. To me, that was how I experienced normalcy returning. When my parents were around, it was livelier, normal again.
Here's the thing though.
If they went outside, they would have told us, but they didn't say anything about leaving the game. If they weren't even playing with us, they would have still said something, but they didn't. No matter where they were, they would have heard us and responded, but they didn't.
No matter what, they would have announced their exit or answered our calls, but never did.
We asked them about this a few years ago and got an answer that made sense, so we know it was real and not a dream or just children not realizing something super slight had happened, like maybe mom and dad went to the bathrooms at the same time because we had two on that floor.
I asked my siblings for more details on what I am unsure of, so I'll edit this when I get them.

since this movie is taking place in 1995, that brings up memories for me, as i was only 8.
the movie took me back to when i had trouble sleeping a lot as a kid. i would wake up in the middle of the night, fearful of the dark, the unknown. it didn’t matter that there was a night light in my room. i felt incredibly alone, and unsafe, even though my parents were sleeping in the next room.

This movie hits completely different when you grew up in not just an abusive household, but a spiritually abusive one at that. Growing up with occult-like themes and being conditioned to think demonic beings are all around you, this movie invoked a completely different kind of terror in me and brought me back to when I was a child, only the nightmares were real. Absolutely terrifying from the deepest parts of my subconscious.

While I can’t personally remember any actual childhood experiences like the one Wendigoon describes, I remember having vivid nightmares about being trapped in my elementary school after dark, or waking up in the same room I fell asleep in and everything being “different” in a way I couldn’t adequately describe and feeling terrified by that unfamiliarity. I think that’s the reason liminal spaces are so appealing to me now. It’s like I have a desire in my adulthood to “investigate” those nightmare spaces that scared me as a child, and see what’s really lurking there.

I just love Wendigoom so frikking move. So solid. So concise. So genuine. We need more of him!!!

I like the scene where the father tells his daughter to look under the bed. The cliche is checking under your bed for monsters, right? There's nothing there, but when she comes back up, her father is gone and her mother is there. Her mother is the monster and it doesnt even have to hide under the bed anymore.

The sheer intensity of the atmosphere in this movie gave me so much anxiety that at the end i was actually physically exhausted from my heart racing so hard
I didn't feel so much dread for a long time

My biological mom is bipolar, and also has struggled with drug use. I don’t see her very often, maybe once a year, but we do have contact with each other. A lot of this film really spoke to me, both in that regard and as someone who suffers from paranoia and delusions and has grown up dealing with a lot of untreated issues. One second a parent is loving and affectionate, the next they’re angry, vindictive, manipulative and, to put it simply, a monster. It’s confusing and terrifying and it’s not uncommon to feel “trapped”- especially when you still love the person, but the relationship is hurting you and you know that but don’t want to make things worse by trying to do something. It’s even worse when you’re younger. You don’t have the life experience to understand abusive behavior. So many kids have it pushed on them that they don’t get to have boundaries, and you’re told that adults are right and you are wrong, so you just bite your tongue and go along with it because you think it’s just “tough love” or that you don’t have another choice. I adore liminal, disturbing, obscure and experimental horror, especially when its done right and delivers a message, and I think this movie did it quite well.

I think it’s good to mention that the melody that plays when the toys and blood disappears is the same melody on the tv where the bunny phases out of reality

It was pretty obvious to me this is a metaphor for the psychological trauma and pain the children are feeling after their parents get divorced.
They blame their mother for the divorce as she is the one who informed them of it.
The children now live with their Dad and that’s why he calls her to let her know about Kevin’s fall.
The whole movie is about the dissolving of a family and the house they grew up in becoming a scary, unpredictable place.
In the weakest metaphor of the film, the children’s world is literally turning upside down.
The unsafe element introduced to the home is the divorce. Where once having their mom in the house was expected, now that she’s moved out the children would be surprised if she were to suddenly be home.
They are helpless to stop the divorce of fix their parent’s relationship or make things go back to the way they were.

I think this could be an allegory for addiction and how it can tear a family apart through the lens of paranormal powers and childhood trauma.

As an abuse survivor, the doors and windows disappearing feels very similar to how you can't just leave an abusive household. As a kid, it was terrifying knowing that my dad would hurt my mom and I if we tried to leave the house. I don't think I could handle watching the movie, but everything I heard about it in this video resonated so much. It sounds like this movie potrayed childhood fear perfectly

this reminds me of a ceiling fear I had when I was between 5-7 years old when I woke one night and see my mother sitting on the bed giving me her back and this terrifying idea paralyzed me for the first time in my life "what if I called her and she turned her head to me and her face is faceless?!!" then I always had this kind of fear when I was a child, weirdly enough it was always with my mother or grandmother, and those two were the most kind loving people I ever had.
maybe it's just a childish fear of losing them or Separation anxiety especially it was at the age I started to go to school?

Seeing this in the perspective of innocent helpless children who dont fully understand and can't grasp the severity of what situation they are in. It really gives me a terrible feeling in my stomach. I felt absolutely helpless watching it

This film reminded me of a similar experience of fear i had when i was younger,
When i was around 5-7 years old, i constantly has this repeating dream where i was in a car, and The car was on the highway. When i asked my mom where we were going, no one answered so i looked to the driver seat to see no one. I woke up and it kept repeating over and over throughout nights, i wasn’t sure why i was so scared, but it was probably one of my worst fears as a kid

I haven't actually seen this movie but it looks really interesting and definitely something different to a lot of other horror films 🙂 I might definitely check it out 😍🥰

There’s a lot interesting theories going around about this movie, but I’m wondering if Kevin’s fall down the stairs is the catalyst for this whole nightmare. I’m sure the theories of abuse and the parents (or one of them) “skinamarink”ing themselves fit in too, but after seeing the pieces of text like “572 days” and “mommy” as and endless loop happens COULD just be supernatural, OR Kevin could be stuck in a coma from his fall. Brain activity during comas is very interesting in how a lot of the censoring that your brain does normally turns off. Along with all the instinctive fears children have (such as fears of the dark, fears of death, etc.), any traumatic experiences Kevin might have had prior to his fall would definitely be uncensored and coming at him in the wildest ways imaginable if he was stuck in a coma. But that’s just my thoughts

This movie is such an accurate representation of what a child's fear feels like, we as adults can't really comprehend it anymore. We hear a strange noise and we fear an intruder, a 10 year old hears a strange noise and he fears the monster, but a 5 year old, a 5 year old fears that which he can't comprehend what it is, he fears the darkness despite not knowing what could be lurking within it. We all fear the unknown, but as we grow up, that which is unknown grows smaller and smaller. Idk, I really like it

i had SO MANY nightmares as a little kid about my house turning upside-down and the fact that i recognize a lot of the toys in this movie makes it feel like some horrible flashbacks

When I was a kid, I always had to watch a happy movie after a scary one. This movie took me back to that time and that line at the end really made me realize that it was meant to.

Your story about being left alone as a kid made me remember when something similar happened to me. I was about 6 or 7 and my Mom had taken my brother to his dance class and my Dad had gone to work. It was morning and the sun was out so it was less terrifying in that regard, but it was still just me and our dog in a silent, empty house with no explanation. I actually remember putting on Cartoon Network to try and make myself feel better, kinda like the kids in the movie. Of course, my Mom and brother came home fairly soon and she felt terrible about it, but this movie makes me think back on that and imagine if they didn't and things only got worse and worse.

I can remember staying at a friend's house. Now I practically lived there so it was like my second home. I remember waking up one night and having to use the bathroom. It was pitch black and I couldn't find my way out of that room. I was feeling the walls for a door and in my mind it was gone cause I couldn't find it. It was absolutely terrifying to me. I was maybe 8. I'm 45 and ill never ever forget that feeling of helplessness and feeling like I'm stuck here forever.

I love with this movie there are so many theories and all of them can equally be true. Art is subjective so everyone can come to their own conclusions. For me personally, I came from a home with an abusive father, I see this as an abusive mother situation. The loss of exits, multiple times the voice telling the kids to do things(the mother), them not following, and them getting harshly punished, even the mother being loving to try and make up for what she did. The toys being taken away, people being changed from the abuse, and even the house is completely different as things get worse. The children see their mother as a monster.

"I got you juice"
That line is so sad but so so so real
As someone who grew up with a lot of nights going to sleep with aguring parents shouting at the top of their lungs this hits home.
I remember doing this for my older sisters specifically, sneaking into the kitchen at risk of being spotted by the furious adults, just to get them a juice box or crakers.
Don't yell around your kids, don't fight around your kids, don't fight at all if you can help it.

This story feels like that of a mother falling into alcoholism, or some other substance, that leads to abuse of the children.
The boy, kevin, sitting with "the monster" late at night before he "trips"; the father having to drive him to the hospital and the mother being out when they return; kaylee saying her brother is up walking around late in the night recently; the signs of some kind of break up between the parents, where the father is hurt and eventually vanishes, and when he does: all hell breaks loose.
All these sensations of everything being turning upside down, being manipulated and led around, where "playtime" is violent and forced. Kaylee, listening to her mother's voice and going to see her in the dark, left afraid and unable to speak to anyone, even her brother.
And as the monster settles silently in front of the TV, with the remaining child terrified and exhausted, he tries one last time to call out for his mother, only to be trapped in an endless cycle of violent torment.

I used to have so many dreams as a kid where doors or windows would just disappear, and I would be trapped. Really freaky.

As a survivor of child abuse this movie is spot on for the fear you feel in that situation. I don't think thats necessarily the answer to "whats the movie about." but its just so accurate.

This reminds me of so many nightmares I had as a kid and I just wanted to see what it all was about but I also found myself actively turning my phone away from me because I didn't want to see any of the potential scary stuff 😂 I'm just a wuss, I guess.

as a child i had this phase where every night between the ages of 4-7, i would wake up every night in the darkness and wander through the house crying. my mom would leave for work at around 10pm to where i was already asleep at that time, id sleep in her bed and wake up with her gone at 2am, and get up to look for her, but obviously wouldn’t find her. id cry and think she abandoned me or didn’t like me anymore, and that i was now alone. no one ever knew i did this, since my mom was obviously at work and my siblings were asleep.
id eventually stop crying,thinking my family left me and go upstairs and cry myself to sleep. and even though id wake up and see my mom was now there, it never crossed my mind she just went to work. id always think she left, or was even murdered and i had to ‘find’ her body, so thats why i walked through the house searching and crying. so i basically spent every night wandering the hallways and sitting on the floor crying for my mom and for someone to come ‘help’ me in the darkness for 3 years.
the whole atmosphere of this movie of being a child and walking through a dark,quiet, abyss of a house and feeling nothing but loneliness and being vulnerable in your own home really reminded me of that phase i had.

It seems like it is an allegory for abuse. The time loop might represent how it repeats daily to the point of feeling trapped forever. The change from "close your eyes" to the mom not having a name seems to be the first steps into abusive behavior that then escalate to the point of not recognizing the person as mom anymore. If the parents are getting a divorce, it might be that the mom is punishing the children for reminding her of the father. Which would explain why its only started happening after that. The legos on the ceiling probably represents happy times moving further out of reach as further emphasized by the long stretching hallway.

The part where Kevin can't dial 911 correctly reminds me of these somewhat recurring dreams I get where I'm trying to dial the numbers or write my own number for someone, mainly to help them, and I can't seem to dial them, or I hit the wrong numbers or something along those lines

The greatest injustice is that it has a 2.7 star rating on amazon, because the npcs thought it was going to be "ooh "scary" action packed thriller!"

It’s really the first horror movie to genuinely instill fear in me in a very long time