At the center of Under the Skin is a woman named Laura (Scarlett Johansson). When we first meet her, she is in an eerie white room, taking the clothes off an unconscious woman. After a while, she gets into a van and starts driving around the streets of Glasgow. She occasionally stops to chat up the random male passerby. She initially asks for directions, but soon it’s clear that she’s flirting. She’s also trying to determine if these men live alone; or really, if anyone’s going to miss them. When she finds a suitable target, she drives them back to her place, where they are ostensibly going to have sex. But the men are in for something else entirely.
What happens exactly is never fully explained, and honestly, it doesn’t really matter. The movie is very loosely based on a novel by Michael Faber, and if one is really interested in the background details of what exactly is going on, one could seek that work out. But Under the Skin makes the much bolder choice of stripping the story down to its most basic parts. In doing so, the movie becomes this stunning, often terrifying mood piece that thrillingly studies modern gender dynamics through sci-fi conceits.
One could describe every single scene of this movie without spoiling any of it. No matter how detailed one narrates everything that happens, it can’t possibly capture the actual experience of watching the movie. It is a strange, disorienting piece, one that works almost entirely off of atmosphere. The film’s main purpose is to turn the seemingly mundane into something more alien and disturbing. It adds a potent patina of menace to what seem to be just normal conversations.
It’s a cumulative effect; just small details that add up to a really strange picture. Why is this woman driving a white van? Why is she randomly talking to men? One of the film’s most cutting insights is in how strange it still is to see a woman being the aggressor. Scarlett Johansson is terrific in this role. The actress puts on a performance of a performance. She makes it feel like her every interaction is simply part of an elaborate game, with some dangerous purpose hidden behind the most innocuous of lines.
Director Jonathan Glazer also helps build this effect by constantly disorienting the audience. The movie will shift between styles, alternating between glossy abstract of the sci-fi conceit and verité segments that are almost entirely improvised. Johansson is in fact the only professional actor in the entire movie. And many of the conversations she had were with real men shot only through hidden cameras. This added bit of randomness grants those scenes an extra layer of menace. All this is buoyed by Mica Levi’s incredible score. It is unobtrusive, yet constantly sinister. It places us in the head of an alien, the most basic details of the world becoming strange and incomprehensible.
Under the Skin is terrifically bold. Science fiction nowadays tends to be the realm of big budget blockbusters. They’re all essentially the same, the fantastic ideas merely meant to serve as a backdrop to a fairly conventional adventure. Under the Skin instead applies the language of arthouse cinema to these genre trappings. The result is a completely unique creature of a film, one that suggests menace in its every moment, and thrives in the inherent strangeness of the everyday.
My Rating:
