Judging by the viral noise on TikTok — a terrible way to live, IMHO — you’d expect the $15,000-funded Skinamarink to be the next Paranormal Activity. It’s not.

That’s not necessarily a negative. It all depends on the criterion being judged. To consider just the potential for word-of-mouth wildfire among the age groups reacting to its trailer on social media: Do you believe the average millennial or Gen Zer has the patience to sit through 100 minutes of an experimental film? Because that’s what Skinamarink is, one rung above pure abstraction. The majority of moviegoers of any generation don’t possess the palatability for something so mass audience-unfriendly; David Lynch’s Inland Empire finally can cede the title.

Again, not necessarily a negative. While clearly horror, the debut for Canadian filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball is the type of work that nearly defies criticism. Nothing about it operates by notions of convention, yet it represents a singular creative vision free of outside interference or concerns about commercial potential.

In 1995, two young siblings can’t locate their dad in the house. Stranger, the doors and windows — and even the commode — start to disappear; chairs sit on the ceiling. Thumps are heard, as is a disembodied, casually threatening voice. Sound scary? It should.

Through low angles, deliberate misframing and fuzzy imagery that simultaneously suggest surveillance footage and a pirate broadcast, Ball starts at a level of disorientation and builds trepidation from there. As the kids go about their mundane existence, no longer able to tell day from night, only the glow of the television — with its constant parade of public-domain cartoons — offers any comfort (not that “Cobweb Hotel” does). Jolts of terror disrupt that semblance of normalcy.

Ball’s lo-fi aesthetic extends to the sound, humming with the warm pop of vinyl. On its own, that aural element could offer womb-like comfort, but contributing to a whole, it helps make Skinamarink the closest approximation of a dream a feature has achieved. This is no catalog of jump scares; it’s art. —Rod Lott