Under the Skin

Under the Skin (2014)
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Actors: Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Adam Pearson

Synopsis: In Glasgow, a young woman (Scarlett Johansson) cruises the streets in a white van, seeking to lure men back to her property for nefarious reasons.

Review: Under the Skin is most defiantly a film about aesthetics, but, ingeniously, it is that very focus on appearance and tactility that brings to bear what moral and ethics we might be able to glean from its elliptical tale of an alien operation to plunder the human species for some resource associated with their skin.

It’s also a film about orientation, or, rather, disorientation, as Glazer seeks to depict how the world might look from alien eyes. He does this by using a familar, social realist setting, but in cloaking that canvas with an otherworldly, disarming gaze.

As mentioned, the film almost belies any attempt to condense or rationalise it. There is some merit in adopting a gender reading, and on a certain level, this is a very wry, ‘gallows’ satire of male sexuality – how plenty of men would happily get in a car with a pretty girl, no matter how vacant she may seem, for the promise of a leg-over (documented ironically with these men, erect phalluses and all, walking hypnotically to their death knell). There’s also undoubted meta-textual mileage in the juxtaposition of a Hollywood star with the blue-collar Glasgow milieu (Johannson’s van drives through Celtic fans marching to Celtic Park at one point), and, was it me, or were the abstractly haunting death scenes uncanny echoes of the black and white-hued abysses of Lady Washizu in Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood?

In sum, Under the Skin is an immense piece of immersive, experiential cinema, with Glazer seeking to use the medium to transcend rather than to reduce, and, in doing so, he’s created one of the most artful and memorable British films for many a year. (October 2014)