Directed by: Jonathan Glazer
Starring: Scarlett Johansson
Rated R, 108 minutes
You have to admire the ambition – the gall? – of Jonathan Glazer, who sent Scarlett Johansson (“Don Jon”) driving around Scotland in an unmarked white van picking up hitchhikers for the sake of a movie. “Under the Skin” gets exactly where its title implies by making you watch the unsuspecting come into contact with something that could threaten them, something that’s greater than them and exploiting that advantage. If nothing else, it’s a refreshingly unique approach in the ever-present quest for authenticity in movies.
Oh, by the way, this is also a sci-fi movie. It also might be horror. It’s the most experimental movie I’ve seen since “Melancholia,” but “Under the Skin” makes Lars von Trier look like a crowd-pleaser director. This isn’t a movie that makes any effort to make sense, narrative or otherwise. Highly stylized, symbolic sequences take the place of plot points. Dialogue almost never reveals anything about anyone. I don’t recall any characters having names – and if they did, they weren’t important.
So what is “Under the Skin”? Quite simply, it’s the story of an alien who aimlessly seduces various men. Johansson’s calm femme fatale tours the Scottish countryside in her van, picking up strangers, flattering them, taking them to secluded apartments, and then – well, it sounds trivial to say she eats them, but that’s the gist of it.
Long, wordless sequences get us from A to B. Hidden cameras capture large chunks of the action. Characters come and go, seemingly without consequence. This is probably because many “characters” are played by Scots who didn’t know they were acting until after Glazer and company revealed that they’d been filming. (There was an image floating around the internet some months ago of Scarlett Johansson falling on the sidewalk; with the film’s release, would-be paparazzi now must accept that it was staged.) The only consistent, and consistently welcome, presence in the film is Mica Levi’s score, with its brilliantly hypnotic rhythms and haunting minimalism. When the footsteps kick in, we perk up to see if they’ll lead anywhere this time.
Glazer (“Sexy Beast”) doesn’t want you to like this movie the way you like regular movies. His goal isn’t just to make you think, it’s to make you think about what you should think about. Are the men Johansson lures – five of them, progressively empowered in their interactions with her – significant? Does it matter that we’re in Scotland? Is this movie really just an extended play on calling a woman a man-eater? You can simultaneously latch onto everything as significant and proclaim nothing as significant.
In the days since I saw the film, I’ve honed in on the title as the best clue towards Glazer’s MO. “Under the Skin” is creepy, crawly, aggravating, and it’s universal. Johansson’s stoic delivery of an undefined character makes her terrifying for her lack of empathy and comforting for her lack of fear. You can project whatever you want onto her; underneath her uncanny exterior (and perhaps underneath her otherworldly interior) there is something we can relate to. A jilted lover, maybe, or a terrified foreigner. Dare I say it, something humane.
There are a few sequences in the movie, most notably the opening minutes, that hint at something even more basic. The graphics, the sounds, the settings, and even Johansson’s performance are so rudimentary that maybe finding a way to relate is barking up the wrong tree. This is a movie about becoming a human. And while it’s one thing to appear human, it’s another thing entirely to understand human thoughts and behaviors. “Under the Skin” plays out as if aliens came to earth and attempted to assimilate by making what they thought was a standard human movie. It’s totally unique, even if the aliens lost a few things in translation.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 5/9/14.