dpA beautiful stranger offers a man a ride, and an ordinary pickup becomes something much worse. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin turns Scarlett Johansson into an alien predator, then makes the humans around her seem almost as strange. It’s seductive, unsettling sci-fi, but anyone expecting a conventional invasion movie has climbed into the wrong van.
A few words on spoilers. Not all that much happens in Under the Skin—at least, not by conventionally measurable means, but there’s a lot going on under the surface, which the title hints at. If you’re looking for a traditional Hollywood blockbuster, alien invasion movie, this is the wrong movie.
Based on Michel Faber‘s novel, and directed and co-written by Glazer, who also helmed the awesome Sexy Beast, Under the Skin is slow and visually luxurious—though it’s easy to imagine some viewers tearing their hair out.
There are long, lingering shots and stretches with little or no dialogue. Sometimes, this made me wonder what I was missing, and every now and again, I was unsure what the hell was going on, but overall, the aesthetics add to the ambience, which is perfect for a story about an alien trying to navigate humanity.
The overcast, rainy Scottish setting in Under the Skin provides a compelling atmosphere as well. It would have been perfect if I’d eaten a special brownie.
The Under the Skin action starts with Johansson learning to enunciate, even though most humans don’t even bother with that. A man on a motorcycle—or an alien on a motorcycle who appears to be some kind of watcher—retrieves a woman’s body. Johansson’s character takes her clothes.
She sheds a tear as Scarlett Johansson gets dressed in her duds. Perhaps she is another alien who has become too human and is being replaced; the film leaves that possibility open. The abstract opening hardly provides a mission briefing, but these aliens are on Earth to do…something.
That something is seducing men and processing their bits into a usable substance. Motorcycle guy provides Scarlett Johansson with a van, which she uses to go shopping, buying a fur coat and make-up to blend in. She begins picking up unsuspecting men. Some of those encounters have an unusually unpolished quality for a movie built around such a recognizable star, and that’s no accident.
The Real World Is Part Of The Trap
In a 2014 interview with The Upcoming, Glazer explained that the production built small cameras that could be hidden inside the van. Johansson really drove it, and the setup captured both her performance and the people she encountered without a conventional crew crowding the scene. Glazer wanted an alien’s encounter with the actual world, rather than a world neatly arranged around an actress.
That approach also explains one of the film’s strangest ordinary moments. When Johansson falls in the street, the people who help her are passersby, not extras rehearsing a rescue. The contrast matters: the streets feel messy and recognizable, while the black spaces she leads men into seem to obey an entirely different set of rules. The film doesn’t need an explanation of alien technology to make that transition disturbing.
She brings them back to an apartment, casts off her clothes, and lures her victims into a pool of black liquid where they disappear. In the trippiest scene in the movie, one of her conquests disintegrates into ribbons and parts that then disappear down a red tunnel. Scarlett Johansson’s Under the Skin character is a bit like the succubus version of Cloak, who spirits enemies into a dark dimension, but the viewer never really learns more about what the aliens are doing with the men.
She has a few other adventures but also a lot of quotidian human moments, including the one that generated the popular meme of Scarlett Johansson falling.
A Predator Learning To Be Afraid
Scarlett Johansson’s acting in Under the Skin is really quite good. While she’s clearly beautiful, she also successfully pulls off other-worldliness, mostly using her eyes. Even without much dialogue, you can tell she’s changing, becoming more human, which also means being disoriented and afraid.
The more human she becomes, the more at risk she is. Despite her best efforts, fitting in is not in the cards. She is suspended between her human and alien selves, with her own kind pursuing her across the countryside.
Scarlett Johansson’s journey illustrates how much humans suck, I guess. It’s not a new theme, but it’s effectively delivered here in a visual package that was entirely new to me.
While I can totally see people being bored and/or mystified by Under the Skin, if interesting, artistic sci-fi is your thing, or if you enjoy movies that don’t telegraph every last element, I would recommend seeing it (though seriously, don’t forget the brownie). Regardless, we should totally be nicer to aliens.
