Skinamarink and the Many Reddit Theories About Kevin, the Monster, and the Ending

There Is No Monster, It’s All in Kevin’s Head

Early on in the movie, we hear Dad making a phone call. We don’t know who’s listening on the other end of the line, but we do know why he’s calling: Kevin’s fallen down the stairs and hit his head. He was sleepwalking and took a tumble. Dad reassures the person on the line that Kevin’s okay. But some viewers aren’t so sure.

“Kevin is in a coma and everything that’s happening is a result of his brain deteriorating,” writes one user. “After the tumble down the stairs, Kevin begins to forget the layout of his house (which explains the disappearing rooms) and what his family looks like (which is why we never see anyone’s faces). And the faceless monster is a distortion of either one or both of the parents.”

At the risk of suggesting it’s all been a dream inside Kevin’s head, there’s no denying the movie follows a certain dream logic, which comes through in its floaty, sometimes nonsensical plot. In fact, the movie’s very origin goes back to a short film called “Heck” that was itself the result of a YouTube series made up of Ball’s adaptations of commenters’ nightmares. Dreams are very much a part of the DNA of the project, and one of Ball’s major inspirations for making the film.

So, it makes a certain bit of sense that the movie might actually be happening inside the mind of an unconscious Kevin, and the story is about him trying to find a way out of his coma but finding no front door or window from which to metaphysically do so. 572 days is how long Kevin has been trapped inside his own mind, unable to wake up, with a final “go to sleep” from the monster confirming to the audience that it’ll soon be 573.

While the movie’s ending, and the blurry face at the other end of Kevin’s desperate final question, offer no easy answers, it’s possible Ball gave us the most important piece of the puzzle all the way at the start.

Dad Is the Monster

The only other characters we meet in the film besides Kevin and Kaylee are Dad and Mom, although we can’t be sure Kaylee is actually seeing the latter in one of Skinamarink‘s scariest sequences. (One theory suggests the monster is actually pretending to be Mom in order to trick Kaylee into doing whatever it wants.) But at least at the very beginning, when he’s making the mysterious phone call about Kevin, Dad seems very much real. But where does he go? Does he simply vanish along with all the windows and the front door? Or is he still trapped inside the house with Kevin and Kaylee somehow?