In Jonathan Glazer’s striking, unsettling new film Under the Skin, Scarlett Johansson plays Laura, a black-haired siren who lures unsuspecting Scotsmen to their dooms. She’s a succubus or an alien or something. It’s never explicitly stated in the film, though the press notes refer to her as an alien, as the character was in the original novel. But in terms of the actual film, we never get any real confirmation that she is from outer space. Just that she’s on the prowl, bringing lads back to her house, where they find themselves sunk in a black puddle of goo and slowly sucked dry of nutrients. Again, or something.
Under the Skin is certainly not a straightforward film. Never stopping to explain itself, Glazer’s alternately dreamy, creepy, and plodding movie is less concerned with happenings than with mood and sensation. And it creates those quite well. The Scotland of Under the Skin is relentlessly gray and dismal, a tangle of anonymous roads and grimy semi-urban menace. Even a lovely windswept beach becomes a place of horror; in one scene Laura watches, expressionless, as a pair of people drown, standing on the rocks and watching with serene detachment. (This was, to me, the most terrifying and beguiling of the film’s several morbid set pieces. Until the very end, anyway.) But this is not a leering, misanthropic ugliness that Glazer is trading in. Instead, he’s using it to highlight the common decency of the everyday people this creature walks (or drives) among. These people are friendly, helpful, fragile, horny, lonely. They’re, y’know, human.
The obvious metaphor here is that Laura the alien is trying to blend in with everyone else, while still seeking recognition and connection, same as all of us real people are. The trick of the film is that they used cleverly hidden cameras and no small amount of guerrilla bravery to send Johansson out among the real masses to shoot various scenes. Several of the men she meets in the film were just regular blokes who were excited that a pretty woman (whom they didn’t recognize as a movie star) had stopped to chat them up or ask them for a favor. This gimmick, which is blended in pretty seamlessly with the staged parts, allows for a few satisfyingly earnest, delicate breaks from the film’s general air of chilly sleekness.
There is a thematic line running throughout the film that seems interested in Scarlett Johansson as Movie Star, and the results of dressing her up and trying to pass her off in the world of normals certainly says something both disquieting and comforting about the isolation of celebrity. Johansson has very little to say (when she does, she speaks in a credible English, not Scottish, accent) and spends most of her time looking dazed in her bright cherry-red lipstick. Her hair (or, her wig) is cut into an 80s poof, which complements her acid-washed jeans and ill-fitting leopard-print, faux-fur jacket. It’s an awkward look, almost mocking in its approximation of the va-va-voom. But it also makes Laura oddly sympathetic. She’s sexy, yes, but the tacky getup makes her seem just the faintest bit lost, even pathetic. In one scene, Laura trips and falls and some real-life people rush to her aid. The scene was being surreptitiously filmed by Glazer, but a civilian also caught the moment on camera and those images became a popular “Scarlett Johansson falling down” meme, thereby proving Glazer and Johansson’s despondent point about what her fame, with its odd mix of sympathy and scorn, has come to mean.
But a movie this quietly insistent ultimately has to become something more than an ironic take on the nature of celebrity. And Under the Skin does, I think. This is a movie that at its most sensitive is about loneliness, and at its bleakest and most searching is a look at the mechanics of sexual predation.
From some angles, the film could be seen as a flipping of the script—here the men are the victims, objects sought out for their helplessness, punished for their sexuality. (They were quite literally asking for it, in this case.) But the movie never gets all the way around to a full reversal. By the film’s startling climax, Under the Skin is certainly and starkly saying something about the world’s treatment of women—even a man-eating extraterrestrial is eventually subject to the whims of rape culture, pursued and controlled and objectified by men. Glazer seems to be arguing that this is a human inevitability—which is either grimly sympathetic or troublingly dismissive, depending on how you look at it. I didn’t sense any antipathy toward women in this, or in Glazer’s last effort, 2004’s bizarre and hypnotic Birth, so I’m choosing to believe that he’s being urgent about these issues instead of flippant. But I’m still not quite sure.
Much of this film is disorienting and withholding. The music, by young wunderkind Mica Levi, is prickly and playfully eerie, but it keeps us at an arm’s length, its trills and trickles never quite coalescing into a real melody. The cinematography, by Daniel Landin, is a dreary wonder, and by the heart-stopping finale has become a marvel of dark imagination. But it’s frequently cold and staid, clinical in its gaze. Perhaps we in the audience are the real aliens, observing this strange and measured series of pictures and sounds, trying to decipher what it all might mean. Trouble is, the film’s bewitching outer layer is only stripped away at the very end, sending us stumbling back into the real world wondering, with some frustration, about what was underneath, that thing we glimpsed, all too briefly, back there in the dark.
