PLEASE BE QUIET, I HAVE HAD ENOUGH SOUNDS
On Skinamarink (2022) and the unbearable loudness of everything
PART ONE: THE DRIP
I am pursued by noise. This week, I had to text our upstairs neighbour to ask her to stop printing on the ceiling between the hours of one and five AM, because it sounds like an industrial accident minus the screaming. I didn’t say that in the text, of course. I’m a woman in her 20s. I sent a grovelling message which implied the late night printing was probably my fault and, even if it wasn’t, I definitely deserved it.
And before you make any helpful suggestions, I already sleep with earplugs in. This is because of The Drip. If you don’t have one at home, The Drip is a leak from the third story gutter. When it rains, The Drip falls down every five seconds, and hits the concrete outside your bedroom window with the resonance of a slow clap in an empty theatre. CLAP. “Oh well done, now you’re awake.” CLAP. “What do you want?” CLAP. “A medal?” CLAP. “Nope, all you’re getting is the negative health effects of long-term sleep deprivation.” CLAP. “They are bad, by the way.”
Once I tried to locate the source of The Drip and it landed in my eye, which did at least silence it for 5 seconds. It was 2am and I was standing outside in my pyjamas in a thunderstorm, half-blind and shaking my fist at the sky, like King Lear.
One of the reasons all this gets to me is that I have tinnitus (a ringing / white noise in the ears), and sleeping with earplugs in makes it worse. Because earplugs make everything seem quiet, your brain listens harder for the sounds you’re trying to block out, which in turn makes the noises you can hear (the ringing inside your own skull) appear even louder. I agree it seems like a bad system, but as we all know, the brain is beyond reform.
Weirdly, as well as static, beeping and ringing, one of the noises my tinnitus makes sounds exactly like the rhythmic CAH-THUNK! CAH-THUNK! of an old office printer. It’s probably the secret services printing off my thoughts now they’ve softened me up with all this torture. No, I don’t think the sleep deprivation is affecting my judgement.
PART TWO: SKINAMARINK (2022)
On Friday 13th, I went to see viral-hit (AKA widely pirated) horror film Skinamarink. I was uncertain about going to see Skinamarink in the cinema as it looked like a made-to-be-streamed internet horror which would benefit from being watched how it was likely produced: crouched on the floor next to a laptop in a dark room, preferably while eating a pot noodle and crying.
In the end, I was glad to see it somewhere with a proper speaker system, because this is also a great movie about the sensory-overload-horror of noise.
Without spoiling too much, Skinamarink follows two 4(?) year-olds who wake up in the middle of the night to find their parents gone. And along with them, all the doors and windows in the house.
Throughout the film we almost never see the trapped children’s faces, only their spooky little legs tottering around. There is no added music, and the kids communicate via barely audible whispers. The film compensates for this by using eerie, burnt-in subtitles, which make us feel we are fully immersed in the children’s semi-verbal world. They can’t understand the horror unfolding around them, but they can understand each other: their stumbling conversation is their (and our) only anchor to reality.
Nearly the first thing the kids do when they wake up is put on loud cartoons to drown out whatever is going on: they want to cover up both the deafening silence of the lonely house, and the sounds of something else.
Skinamarink is a movie which invites us to listen hard for what’s freaking the kids out, even thought we don’t want to. Like your dumb brain with earplugs in.
The sheer volume of the cartoons at night was incredibly evocative of nighttime childhood fear for me. When you’re a heavy-sleeping kid, loud sounds in the night mean something has gone wrong. Someone is sick. Your parents are arguing. The dog has just eaten your step-dad’s CDs (this actually happened).
So while the cartoon sounds are initially a beacon of safety next to the glow of the screen, as the house becomes more and more hostile to the children’s existence, the loudness of the TV itself becomes threatening. It signifies serious disruption to the children’s routine, and therefore reality.
The rising discomfort caused by the cartoon-noise also accurately recreates one of the symptoms of sleep deprivation: the grating feeling that your senses are “full up.” As someone who can get overwhelmed by sound in the increasingly loud spaces of modern life - the open plan office, the city pub - this movie really expresses an exhaustion with sound. After being somewhere noisy, I often have to sit in the dark because all my senses feel jammed by the exposure. But the Skinamarink kids don’t have this option: the dark is dangerous. Skinamarink is a movie of multi-sensory synesthetic claustrophobia.
This is also why I love another feature of the film: the mock-70s film grain recreates the visual tinnitus of night. The eyes search for something in the swirling mass of darkness, and start generating their own shapes: movement, faces.
I don’t want to reveal much else about Skinamarink, but suffice to say, it’s great. It’s powerfully reminiscent of childhood dread, but for a film which has largely been praised for its idiosyncratic visual style, it also made me think about my relationship with sound.
Now I live in such close proximity to others I often feel I am again a child in the night: hyperaware of the sounds of the house. When I get up in the night because The Drip has snuck past my earplugs, and switch on the TV, I worry about waking up some demonic presence in the house, or worse, some angry adult.
Luckily, the only angry adult in the house is me.
Skinamarink is out on Shudder soon.
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