For his first film in almost a decade, British director Jonathan Glazer
lands an extraterrestrial on the grimy streets of modern-day Glasgow and follows her as she completes an
unexplained mission. Oblique and mystifying, beautiful and grotesque and filled
with haunting images, Under the Skin is likely to repel as many as it
entrances.
Sparsely adapted by Glazer and screenwriter Walter Campbell from Michel
Faber’s cult novel, Under the Skin unfolds as a feverish dream. The first thing
we see is a series of overlapping images; the crescent curves of a planetary
system, a vast, white circular vessel slowly filling with an oily substance and
the black pupil of a human eye without a spark of life. Then a dead woman’s
body is thrown into the back of a truck on the side of a wet road. Another
woman (Scarlett Johansson) strips the corpse naked and puts on her clothes,
seemingly in the process adopting her persona. While doing this, she finds a
solitary black ant and examines it closely as it wriggles on her fingertip.
Without uttering a line of dialogue or providing any overt exposition, Glazer
has established the scene: this ‘woman’, arrived from somewhere else, will
study us in the same way she studies the insect. She is not the benign
anthropomorphic alien of ET or Close Encounters, here to teach and heal. She
looks like a person; she looks like Scarlett Johansson in fact, but is as
separate and unknowable to us as we are to the ant.
Glazer’s camera takes us onto the streets of the Scottish capital, leads
us between the people on the streets, watching as they tap out texts, smoke
cigarettes and wander through the shops. The woman buys new clothes to match
the city crowd, gently applying a smear of red lipstick and a smudge of eye-liner.
As Johansson drives around the street-lit roads in a white van, looking for
likely men to enrapture and ensnare, Glazer adopts the techniques of
hidden-camera reality television to give us glimpses of how his alien slips
unnoticed through the cracks. She stops the van to talk to men in a politely
clipped English accent, always checking first that they are alone and unlikely
to be missed. More often than not, they respond to her charming questioning and
get into the van with her.
Soon after, in the film’s most visually striking sequences, Johansson
leads the men into a black room with a shiny, slick floor and watches as they
sink beneath the surface, to be absorbed by an oily black liquid and
transformed into something unspoken. Is she collecting trophies, processing
food or collating data? We cannot say for sure and the uncertainty is
unnerving. Again and again Glazer shows us this process, extending the scene by
moments and adding more details, until we make the connections for ourselves.
In the first act, Glazer’s methodical pace, deliberate repetition and
disorienting tone is structured to reflect the alien’s utter inscrutability and
the apparently simple terms of her mission. Things gradually start to change.
She meets a potential victim, lures him into her van and only then notices his
facial deformity. Uniquely, she allows him to escape. The next day she falls on
her face in the street and is bewildered when passers-by try to help her. From
that moment on, the story gathers emotions around it like an out-sized overcoat.
She struggles to cope with new sensations of empathy, pity and fear. When her
motorbike-riding handler, credited only as The Bad Man (and played by
professional racer Jeremy McWilliams), discovers his charge has fled the city
into the Scottish highlands, he gives chase. The predator becomes prey.
Told with minimal dialogue and with a vibrato mood of anxiety and
tension, there are moments where the film contorts into pure horror,
particularly in a sequence at a bleak, wind-torn beach where Johansson stands
mutely on the shore. We watch as a woman drowns in the pounding surf, her
frantic husband attempts a rescue and their toddler sits screaming on the sand.
The alien walks away. It is the most stomach-clenching scene I have watched in a
cinema in years; a moment of icy disregard that serves to remind the viewer
that they are human, that they have feelings, that they couldn’t just stand by
and watch other people suffer. Mico Levi’s throbbing electronic score ratchets
up the dread, sounding at times like a whispered conversation between
computers, or an almost-subsonic alien language.
As the film weaves between the gliding precision that Glazer exercised
in Sexy Beast and Birth and more rough-and-ready CCTV images, Johansson remains
the constant, effortlessly switching from sunny and gorgeous to an unsettling
blankness, every wrinkle of posed humanity falling off her face in a heartbeat
when no-one is looking. It’s a brave, engrossing performance of twisted
eroticism that grounds an always intriguing, sometimes astonishing audio-visual
experience. Glazer crafts a mesmerising, surreal spell: some audiences will
fall for it and some will remain unmoved but Under the Skin remains lodged
beneath mine.
