Abstract Awakening — Under the Skin review
A version of this appeared in The Scotsman in March 2014.
Disorientating, disturbing, weirdly funny in places, confounding in others, Jonathan Glazer’s third feature, Under the Skin, is the kind of movie that makes a virtue of cinema – not as a medium of mass entertainment, but as a visual art form, one in which hyper-realistic images can be used to tell abstract stories that explore universal themes in a more provocative and interesting manner.
Loosely adapted from Michel Faber’s Highland-set novel of the same name, it’s a story of literal and figurative alienation, one that examines the notion of what makes us human by relocating the action of Faber’s book from Ross-shire to Glasgow and using it as a jumping-off point to present a vision of modern day Scotland through the disconnected gaze of an extra-terrestrial siren (Scarlett Johanson) as she hunts and kills unattached men.
The details of why she’s doing this aren’t exactly forthcoming; Glazer sets the hypnotic, elliptical tone from the off with a striking opening sequence in which an amalgam of weird images – accompanied by Mica Levi’s cacophonous, astringent score – gradually reveal themselves to be the iris of a particularly luminous eye. That eye belongs to an alien being who takes the form of Johansson, nubile and naked and ready to be birthed into the world as a 21st century temptress.
From here we follow Johansson (stretching herself more than she’s done before) as she attempts to assimilate into society, wandering around Glasgow shopping centres, unobtrusively observing the daily rituals of regular people with the detached curiosity of an entomologist. During the day she drives her van around the city centre, her gaze drifting after any solitary men she sees crossing the streets in front of her. When night rolls around she drives through Govan – and other less-than-salubrious areas of the city – on the prowl for willing punters who can’t quite believe that someone who looks like her is giving them the come-on while asking for directions to the M8.
Shot largely on the fly with hidden cameras and unwitting (at first) participants, the film achieves a strange tension in these moments as the unpredictability of real-life crashes headlong into Glazer’s artistic conceit. Speaking in a plummy English accent and decked out in a dark wig and cheap fur coat, Johansson finds her efforts at picking up local men frequently interrupted – by friends shouting on the person she’s singled out, or mention being made of a loved one or a family (it’s an unspoken trait of the character that she takes home only those who will not be missed).
Those she does invite into her van respond to her small talk with unscripted awkwardness or inarticulate bravado, which can be funny, and a little cringe-worthy too, but only because of how real and relatable it seems. Indeed, this may be why some audience members at the recent Glasgow Film Festival premiere responded so negatively to the film: it’s to misinterpret these scenes as somehow mocking their participants when they do the opposite: whether the sequences are improvised (as the early ones are) or staged (as a later one is), they’re so startling because the collective humanity of these soon-to-be victims can’t help but shine through, something that starts having a debilitating impact on this alien huntress’s ability to do her job.
That job – which seems to be permanently monitored by a mysterious man on a motorbike – involves luring men to an abandoned house and casting their naked bodies into a gloopy abyss. Only once do we see what happens to them after this, a moment of whacked-out weirdness involving flayed skin that hints at a major element of the book without explicitly acknowledging what’s going on. As he does with the opening sequence, Glazer – who prior to making Sexy Best was best known primarily for creating the Guinness “Surfer” ad – unleashes the full force of his celebrated promo-making skills here.
But he also knows when to rein them in too and the most disturbing moments in Under the Skin are the chilly, low-key ones where Johansson’s automaton attempts to understand and process human emotion. Undergoing a sort of abstract awakening, she becomes more vulnerable and more human the more aware she grows of her own alien otherness, leading to a remarkable dénouement that suggest the urge to destroy what one doesn’t fully understand is an alien trait that’s all too human.
It all adds up to a remarkable and audacious piece of filmmaking, beautiful and rough-hewn, and fully engaged with its location in a way that so few films made in Scotland ever are (when Scarlett Johansson is seen puzzling over a radio phone-in debate on independence, it grounds the film in the here-and-now in way that Filth and Sunshine on Leith actively avoided). Mostly, though, Under the Skin is like its star: enigmatic and alluring to the end.