There’s a whole lot to love in director Jonathan Glazer‘s latest sci-fi/art film, Under the Skin. If you’re a cinephile who loves raving about the brilliance of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, or enjoy seeing Scarlett Johannson grace the big screen (and baring all), and certainly all three, then this movie will provide you with plenty of cinematic nourishment to at least convince you that beautiful and daring films are still being made.
Glazer, a former music video director for bands like Radiohead and feature film director, including 2004’s Birth starring Nicole Kidman, channels the aforementioned old masters in creating a darkly hypnotic meditation on the mundaneness and strangeness of the human condition. With aliens (or some “other” being). Photographically, compositionally, visually, the film is some of the most inspired and impressively shot frames of film that have been projected in years.
In terms of the film’s story, however; it’s going to take a motivated inner cine-spirit to keep your enthusiasm high throughout the film’s runtime. Although viewers shouldn’t dismiss the film’s long spurts of silence- there’s a whole lot of it, including the film’s fantastic opening sequence, which moves into a Kubrick-ian stage-setting of Johansson’s mystery and unnamed character clothing up (like Schwarzenegger’s Terminator)- the film wishes itself against any semblance of a more accessible narrative storytelling and pacing. And so what we have here is a patiently moving, slowly creeping movie featuring an incredibly photographed yet largely mute Johansson.
Johansson here gives an incredibly restrained and erotically charged performance, and this role should further establish herself as a serious actor.
Without giving too much away, Under the Skin’s story has much to do with just what exactly is under Johansson’s mystery character- kind of. On a literal level, we know something is awry and not right with the leading lady, having just witnessed her newly transplanted self-roaming silently and curiously around the public spaces of Scotland (where the movie takes place). Johansson here gives an incredibly restrained and erotically charged performance, and this role should further establish herself as a serious actor. Although seeing the starlet, in a cropped black wig and piercing red lips, channels instant sex appeal, Glazer has his way with adding to it a touch of strangeness that denies an unrestricted lust onto her, even in scenes of seeing her in complete shadowy undress. Although that cinematic reading isn’t available to the also unnamed and unsuspecting Scottish male victims in the movie, whom Johannson’s character (can I start calling her The Woman?, Apologies to Glazer if this breaks any artistic meaning) drives alongside and brings back to her black-hole chamber of a flat, evoking the dream-like surrealism of an Eraserhead-era Lynch.
And so the story goes: The Woman experiences unfamiliar human events, watching the daily commuters shuffle along the streets, watching human interactions of a family at the beach and young people at the night club, and all the while, continuing to pick up the innocent yet lust-worthy males (IMDB’s trivia page states that the men were not real actors, filmed with hidden cameras and only informed they were in a movie afterwards) that keep getting taken back to her spider’s web of a flat. The film moves steadily, but these scenes envelope onto themselves constantly to convey the repetitions that Glazer shows as the low-brain activity Woman might experience them.
But- if you are eager and willing to dive deeper into this wildly imagined ride, there are also much deeper thematic takeaways on display. Just like under The Woman’s skin, things aren’t always as they appear to be. This theme extends from the (possible) literal example of The Woman, but more so about the metaphorical associations and acceptances that a modern-day society recognizes. A beautiful rose pricks the hand with its hidden thorns, and a delicious looking chocolate cake elicits a gag from The Woman. However subtle and artful, it should be acknowledged that Glazer is confronting these issues while lensing a strangely erotic and exotic world female. Don’t expect to forget about this film after viewing either; Under the Skin will haunt you for days. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoSWbyvdhHw
