Under the Skin

Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin arrived in 2013 with almost no warning. Glazer hadn't made a feature since Birth in 2004, and what he brought to Venice that September was a different kind of science fiction film. Scarlett Johansson plays an alien in a human body, driving a white van around Glasgow, picking up men. The film strips away almost everything you'd expect: exposition, character names, a conventional score. What's left is image, sound, and a creeping sense of wrongness that doesn't let up.

The street scenes were shot with hidden cameras. Johansson approached real men on real streets, many of whom had no idea they were in a film until later. That documentary texture sits next to the film's most famous sequence, a black void where men sink into nothing while she watches. The contrast between the ordinary and the impossible is the whole point. Glazer and cinematographer Daniel Landin make the everyday look alien and the alien look almost mundane.

Mica Levi's score, all scraping strings and low drones, does as much work as the script, which is spare to the point of silence in the second half. The film earned about $7.2 million against a $13.3 million budget, a commercial disappointment that did nothing to slow its reputation. Critics were largely mesmerized; audiences were split. A decade on, it's a fixture of art-house canon and film school syllabi, and Johansson's performance remains the boldest of her career. [edit]

A point of light opens into an eye. Geometric shapes slide into place, and something like a consciousness assembles itself out of the dark. That wordless opening is the closest Under the Skin comes to explaining where its main character comes from. She appears next behind the wheel of a plain white van, driving through Glasgow and the housing estates on its edges. She speaks with a flat, friendly Scottish accent, asks men for directions, offers them a lift. The conversations feel improvised because many of them were: Glazer and his crew filmed Johansson approaching real pedestrians with hidden cameras, and most of the men had no idea they were being recorded.

She brings them back to a house on a quiet street. Inside is a dark room, featureless, with a black, reflective floor. The men walk forward into it and sink beneath the surface as though into liquid glass, staring ahead, apparently calm. She watches from the edge. The film never explains what happens to them or why. A man on a motorcycle, muscular and watchful, follows her through the city, retrieves the clothes her targets leave behind, and cleans up. He's played by Jeremy McWilliams, a former Grand Prix motorcycle racer rather than an actor, and his silence makes him more unsettling than any dialogue could.

The first half of the film runs almost like a procedural. The van, the small talk, the walk into the void. Glazer repeats the pattern until it starts to feel like ritual, and then he breaks it. She picks up a man with severe facial disfigurement, played by Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis type 1 and was making his screen debut. He is gentle, lonely, and clearly used to being treated as a monster. Something in the encounter doesn't fit her routine. Not long after, she leaves the van, the house, and the motorcyclist behind and sets out on her own across Scotland.

The second half is quieter and stranger. She tries to live as a human being. She eats. She takes a room. She attempts intimacy and finds it confusing, sometimes painful. The film becomes a study of what it feels like to be embodied, vulnerable, and alone, and of how quickly the human world turns on anything it can't categorize. The motorcyclist is still looking for her. The film's final act moves into a forest, and the ending is best discovered cold.[edit]