DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Glazer
FEATURING: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Pearson
PLOT: An alien in the form of a beautiful woman skulks around Glasgow in a white van hunting for single men, whom she collects for some unknown but supposedly nefarious purpose. Eventually she becomes confused by her own temporary humanity, and her physical body starts to shut down.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: With an acute vision and a puzzling but highly rewarding plot, Under the Skin is easily among the best of 2014, and may well turn out to be the weirdest. The action moves slowly, but is filled with wonderfully bizarre imagery and powerful space-y scoundscapes. Its storytelling is inventive, and nothing is obvious.
COMMENTS: Under the Skin opens with abstract images of space and birth, with the sounds of a woman learning to talk played over the ambient score. An unnamed biker pulls a dead woman into a van, in which a naked Scarlett Johansson takes on her appearance, and her clothing. The next day, she begins her unexplained quest for bodies, driving around and innocently asking for directions while slyly prying into her prey’s background. If they have girlfriends or family, or are on their way to meet friends, she leaves, but if she determines them to be alone and single, she invites them back to her weird abandoned-looking house. Entranced by her beauty, they follow her blindly until they are absorbed into the floor, sinking into black goo. When she comes upon a disfigured young man (Adam Pearson), she falters in her single-minded mission, and begins to look for human experiences, though she is generally unable to understand them.
Adamantly maintaining a “show, don’t tell” attitude, Jonathan Glazer teases his audience with nibbles of information, encouraging us to assemble the puzzle pieces ourselves. This type of storytelling forces us to carefully consider every image presented, questioning characters’ unstated motives and giving a close reading to each scene. The movie is almost palpably quiet, relying little on dialogue and offering a mix of natural background noise and unearthly music, leaving a lot of room for inner thought to fill in the stillness. We must connect how the silent biker is related to Scarlett Johansson’s character, what purpose the abducted men serve, what prompts the protagonist to abandon her hunt, and why she seems to be struggling with her alien body. All of this information is made available to us, if we pay attention. Every shot is precise and deliberate, with many scenes carefully constructed through the use of hidden cameras—so many of the men interacting with Johansson are at first unaware that they are in a movie. There is an intriguing combination of gritty, rainy urban areas, dark but lush forests, and weird alien spaces, plus the juxtaposition of hidden-camera verism and sci-fi unreality. It is at once unsettling, confusing, exciting, and utterly compelling.
This is, for the most part, understated weirdness. Glazer’s non-expository, matter-of-fact style belies how inventive the film’s approach really is. He reveals an alien’s view of our world, and often makes humanity as strange to his audience as it is to his protagonist. The men’s thickly-accented, slang-ridden speech is often confusing (to this American viewer, that is), and common human rituals are made to appear odd. Why do we wear make-up? Or eat chocolate cake? Or have sex? An extended sequence shows a family spending time on a rocky beach, but the parents leave their toddler on the shore as they swim out to save their drowning dog. The protagonist watches this dramatic scene from afar, a nonpartisan observer, not so much uncaring as she is disengaged, never moved to help or hinder because their plight just isn’t related to her. Even the considerable nudity is approached with a sense of detachment, and made to be completely nonsexual despite the context. Though her origins are never actually mentioned, there is no doubt she is an alien creature, a hunter given human form but never made to understand the person she inhabits. The sick joke is that while visually she embodies the human equivalent of prey—female, beautiful, small, alone—inwardly she is a powerful predator. Under the Skin is a strange and dark thriller that manages to wryly comment on gender stereotyping and (straight) sexual relations without actually delivering any kind of message. As a film, as a story, as a work of art, it simply is.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
The theme of Under the Skin is a lot like The Man Who Fell to Earth, except that the tragic element here is Johansson’s inability to become human, whereas is Roeg’s film the tragedy is that Bowie’s alien does become fully human—he’s dragged down to our level.
The abstract sequences were fantastically trippy and they made the first half of the film better than the second half for me. This is the sleek, Kubrick-y style they were going for in Beyond the Black Rainbow, but here they have the budget to really pull it off.
im for sure gonna check this one out. nice review!
In my view, Glazer was trying to combine the chilly cold, menacing WTF style of “Beyond the Black Rainbow” (2010) (with the 70s and early 80s aesthetics of that one, I’ve also seen a number of reviews to refer to “Under the skin” as “The Woman Who Fell to Earth”) with a recent, hitchcockian hommage to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978), Sean Ellis’s “The Broken” (2008). I’ve heard it being referred to as “the female version of BtBR”, while for me, “Under the skin” doesn’t reach the same cinematic, immersive, and hypnotic heights as does BtBR.
“Laura”‘s (which is how cast and crew refer to our protagonist) predecessor in the beginning is not dead, as she cries a single tear as Laura is undressing her, she’s catatonic (most likely from going through the same thing Laura is about to face). The parents don’t swim after their “dog”, they’re trying to save the toddler boy’s older sister.
In any case, I’ve never been able to work out whether Laura’s really confused at her human shell coming off in the end or if she’s just depressed then (“Bummer, now they’ll see me for what I am…”). From the film’s first shots where it looks like she’s being “generated”, I thought she was an entirely artificial programmed machine or cyborg with no memory of her home world, her creators, or overall meaning and consequences of her mission. But then I read up on the source model where she’s pretty much just an alien in a human suit, really remembering her homeworld and knowing what she’s doing, which is harvesting human meat as delicatessen food for her home planet (in the novel, they were a married couple and Brad Pitt was gonna play her husband, but Grazer eventually removed his character).
On the other hand, Glazer does make it pretty ambivalent by leaving out this entire backstory, and especially due to her fundamental change when she sees her human self in the mirror and tries to eat human food, either the knowing alien theory or the ignorant cyborg theory could be true.
If you like this movie and want to fill in the blanks, and then elevate your appreciation for the the film . . read the book. That isn’t always great advice – but in this case – it’s perfect, and illuminating – and makes you wish the filmmakers would have taken the short story a little more literally. . . from simply sci-fi to true sci-fi horror. The book combined with the film are genius in tandem.