I typically don't review movies, but this one was egregious.

First and foremost, if you're going to do a found footage movie, you typically set up a premise of why the footage would be found, so either someone was recording a documentary and this is a reenactment, or someone discovered the house and found the tapes and published them (this seems unlikely later in the movie for so many reasons). There's gotta be some way to excuse the fact that cameras are running the entire time that we're now seeing what is real-life footage. Justifying this should have been job number one. However, this movie really doesn't bother doing that. So you're just seeing footage where we don't know how it got into our hands? Why are we watching this? The only way this footage could have happened would be to have a household of, like...30 reverential, sluggish Roombas rolling around the house, eyes cast towards the ceiling, recording weird shit. If a couple vantage points have been chosen, and there are a couple of rooms or shots that you returned to several times that could have been used a little better. You know, maybe there were a couple of cameras set up in a home in the 90s, not a full home-roaming video setup. The fact that the camera goes willy-nilly at some points, and other times were boring-ass shots for way longer than I could stand made me realize that this is NOT found footage. What's the explanation, then? Was the Entity in the house recording things (which doesn't make sense)? I'm asking because there are a couple point-of-view shots that actually move through the house in a sequence instead of being a static shot. Which is fine. But some of them pay off and some of them don't. So it's like, "ah, let's walk up these fucking stairs. Alright, now let's go back to the static shot." There's only one point-of-view scene that actually works out exceptionally well and it's very creepy. But then they don't do that again for the rest of the movie!

Another thing that bothered me is that there's a point where the point of view character closes their eyes, and we don't get to see anymore (which means the camera's eyes are closed too?). However, they don't show things like, you know, blinking or anything like that. Is the camera their eyes or not?! The whole thing's a mess that ends with a jumpscare, but one where nothing actually happens with the jumpscare, and it's just glitchy and impossible to see what was supposed to be scary.

Everything has just such a heavy, heavy grain on it, which definitely gets used for suspense without a lot of payoff. The tension builds because you're not sure what will pop out of a very heavily grainy shot of nothing, and often nothing happens. You're often left wondering, "Is something going to pop out? Am I gonna start to make sense of the grain washing around in front of me? The answer is generally no. So not only is there endless, ridiculous inside-the-house footage, which is numbingly dull.

Occasionally there are subtitles peppered throughout for some—but not all—parts of the dialogue. This means if we assume the subtitles are a part of the tapes we found: Why the fuck aren't there subtitles on everything? What asshole came in and only put subtitles on a few parts of the dialogue and skipped others completely?

What would have made this scary and lends itself to found-footage credibility is if the conceit was that someone was attempting to do a transcript, and you find out that the person putting these fucking subtitles in was like, "I don't know what they're saying either!" [Dialogue unclear] or [mumbling] or [scary noises] would make it clear that not only do YOU not understand what the heck is being said, but there's also SOMEONE ELSE who ALSO doesn't understand what the heck is being said, and have that be on purpose. But instead, they just don't put subtitles in parts. And you don't understand what's being said.

Secondary to that, since fuck justifying a found-footage film is from a filmmaker's perspective: What asshole came in and only put subtitles on a few parts of the dialogue and skipped others completely? I would potentially watch the movie again with closed captioning on (or maybe just read the closed captioning) to understand what the fuck some people were saying at specific times. The audio processing is fucking egregious. It was challenging to tell in the theater if what I was hearing was coming from another movie next door that had rumbling sequences or if some of the rumbling was actually occurring in Skinamarink. Everything is so garbled, and the voices are too loud. Everything else that isn't a voice is not loud at all. There are a couple of jumpscares, and those spots are loud. But the loudness comes across as not just the fact that it's cranked up in the theater but that the audio was clipping like mad the entire time it's being recorded. Some people are just too close to the microphone. It plays super strange and not in a particularly helpful or even scary way. It was primarily obnoxious, and they didn't do a good job of determining who was talking. I'm not talking about, "oh, there's this like Entity that's in the house that's talking in different ways." That was easy to pick out. However, the two children aren't introduced; they talk like two children and sound like two children. It's unclear which child is doing what or what is happening until eventually (spoilers), one child goes missing. At that point in time, you're aware of which child you're left with, but that doesn't happen until TWO-THIRDS of the way through the movie. Honestly, the first hour of the film was absurdly bland. I was desperate for a child to scream or something to break up the monotony, which, finally, they do scream (over nothing, I might add). It took a long, long, long time to get going.

The fear created by the analog horror genre is typically derived from having the things that you are familiar (or familial) with being replaced by unknowable Entities. The designs of these Entities are outside human understanding. That is scary in and of itself. The way this reveals itself is through the repetition of patterns and the repetition of things that are well-known to you. The movie does a little bit of that. This home is very familiar, and you start noticing: why did the window go missing? How long have the doors gone? The house is changing subtly. Your parents change. Your siblings change. That's scary. However, the way they did it in this movie, there wasn't enough repetition of certain themes to build in the creeping sense that something is going wrong. As a viewer, I didn't know the baseline mood and layout of the home from the start. The house was filmed really creepy, but until things really start rolling, it's just hard to make sense of everything. Without the rules of the genre established, you don't realize what the threat is, so it ends up feeling like the horror is "everyone is weirdish." Your parents being replaced by doppelgangers could be terrifying, but instead, the parents are portrayed to seem EXHAUSTED. They're too tired to put up a fight, but they say parental words and are distant from the kids, and I don't feel like they've been replaced with the Entity. They're like husks. I feel like having the children react to "that's not my parent anymore" would have been way more palpable, but the "our parents aren't here. Yes, they are. No, they aren't." didn't build much tension. There's something convoluted happening with their mother, but it's never explored, and we're just as clueless as the children.

I feel like without knowing the rules of what's happening, you're left to figure it out. However, what you figure out isn't scary.

There were four or five good concepts that could be turned into a couple excellent 5 to 10-minute analog horror YouTube videos. Watching these ideas uncut, jumbled up in a two-plus hour format was a waste of the ideas and, ultimately, a waste of time.