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Apr 04, 2014 By John Oursler Web Exclusive

How to properly articulate what makes Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin a visionary, thought-provoking sci-fi masterpiece? My first instinct was just to say “This movie is fucking amazing” and leave it at that, because Glazer’s statement is manifested so uncompromisingly that it’s hard to say how it could be better or different. It feels very much like no other movie I’ve seen, either as an entry into a very broad genre or otherwise. The genius stems unilaterally from the direction, so a standard form synopsis doesn’t do the relatively simple story any justice.

Scarlett Johansson plays an unnamed alien (we’ll call her X) who adopts the full-body skin and make-up of a woman in the abstract opening moments. The film starts with a pitch black screen with no sound, an all-encompassing void, and slowly metamorphosizes into corporeality along with its protagonist. Incoherent utterings become a woman’s voice, X’s, and the void slowly becomes some semblance of a person, at least visually. Glazer soon cuts to a penetratingly white set on which X quietly approaches the woman whose skin she’s ostensibly inherited, and she proceeds to very routinely take the woman’s clothes, shoes, and “become” her. X is then picked up along the side of a road by an unnamed motorcyclist who sets her up in a house, gives her a van, and vanishes into the fog of Scotland’s hillsides. Mind you, all this takes place with no voiceover and no dialogue, accompanied by ambient sounds. The viewer is eased into the film’s intoxicating and unique rhythms.

The first half consists almost exclusively of X set up in her tricked out van stalking her prey and the streets of Scotland. To accomplish an unfettered POV feel, Glazer had Johansson go incognito with little security through the streets; similarly, much of the action takes place with discreetly placed cameras in X’s van to capture interactions with locals, almost all of whom were non-actors (they later signed consents). Because the camera was always on, this necessitated that Johansson had to be as well, and her nearly wordless performance transfixes through a combination of unnerving facial tics, eye movements, and mechanized pickup lines. She approaches men in her van and asks them a series of questions to determine if they’re alone and if they’re interested, (which, let’s face it, this is a woman who looks like Scarlett Johansson, so who wouldn’t want to get into her van?) she drives them to her remote home and, once inside, they succumb to the nothingness inside. This is an interesting process because the interaction begins with her stripping and telling her prey to follow suit, so they think they’re going to get it on with a dark, mysterious woman, but as they follow her they unknowingly succumb to an abyss. Submerged, they become the epidermis donors for creatures like X, and their body, or soul, vanquishes. Once they’re gone, she walks back from whence she came, collecting her clothes (walking on water, so to speak), and begins the routine of finding her next victim.

In the second half X begins to evolve from maneating automaton into a thing that feels and thinks. It’s unclear if this is the natural cycle for one of her species of if it’s catalyzed by an interaction with a disfigured man whom she meets and, through empathy, wants to give release. He becomes like her, and is picked up by the same shadowy motorcyclist conduit from X’s beginning. This sacrificial act seems to free X from the confines of her mission, and she then embarks on an equally mysterious path of self-discovery that ends as tragically and mysteriously as it began.

Glazer enlisted first-time film composer Mica Levi to create aural accompaniment for X’s experience, one that transposed the audience into the surreal universe in which this otherworldly existed and thrived. It works because Levi’s score changes and repeats as X does, but always remains unsettling and a little bit discordant.

There are few answers and many questions that arise from Under the Skin’s oblique approach, but that’s also what makes it an exciting, intelligent alternative in a crowded, simpering cinematic marketplace. One could extrapolate on the gender politics implicit in X’s endeavor, but I’m not sure that’s foremost in Glazer’s mind. In a way this is a letter about an unknown woman that looks and feels like nothing that’s come before it. It would be easy to see X as a modern femme fatale, decked out in dark clothes, a mysterious figure existing solely to hasten man’s ultimate demise. And there’s a lot to be said for the moment when you finally see what is actually under X’s skin, and about how that serves as metaphor for woman’s experience. This all serves to enrich a film that is at once both utterly transfixing and subtly discursive. The environment Glazer and Johansson create will indeed get under your skin, and, for cinephiles, you’ll be all the better for having experienced it.

www.undertheskinmovie.com

Author rating: 9/10