Under the Skin *** (2013, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy McWilliams, Lynsey Taylor Mackay) – Movie Review

British director Jonathan Glazer’s loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel is a unique, difficult and quite alienating movie. It’s hard work having a good time with Under the Skin. But Scarlett Johansson impresses enormously as a sultry, black-wigged alien cruising the drab and dingy lesser-known streets of Glasgow in a beat-up van to prey on and kill the local lonely men.

How did the alien get there? What does she want? We’ll never know.

Scarlett has to do almost all her acting with her looks and her body, as she has only a few lines of minimal dialogue spoken in an effective, posh, clipped English accent, as though learnt and perfected by an alien. Scarlett really is an alien in the Glasgow suburbs of course, about the last place on earth you’d expect to find her. I guess that’s the point, though points are hard to fathom in this unfathomable film.

And Glazer’s arty horror film is as stylish as it is creepy and disturbing. It’s wildly imaginative and visually outstanding, with nightmarish vision sequences punctuating the fuzzy, immediacy of the grungy, grainy CCTV-type filming.

Under the Skin starts promisingly as if it’s a serial killer movie, but then it goes crazy, showing the final naked moments of the alien’s victims’ lives, and stranger still when the alien is sidetracked into being kind to a disfigured man. There’s a particularly troubling sequence involving a baby abandoned on the wintry beach. We know how we feel about this but the question here is how does the alien see this?

The pacing’s dreamlike, so the film lacks any sense of urgency. To enjoy it and appreciate it, you have to immerse yourself into it and let yourself succumb to it and follow it in its own time. Of course, sitting watching Scarlett for 108 minutes is never going to be such a terrible thing. She’s pretty much in the ‘interesting just reading the phone book’ category these days. And here she does quite a lot more than that. It’s a good gig for her, obviously brave and clearly increasing her cred.

Many audiences will feel frustrated, even angry towards it. It was booed on its first screening at the Venice Film Festival. Other viewers will consider it a work of art. There’s nothing like it, and never will be, thank goodness.

I hesitate to recommend it, and I hesitate to say “you’ve got to see it”. But you really could try it out for yourself to see if you love or hate it.

Glazer says: ‘If they say “I couldn’t tell you what the ***k it was about but you’ve got to see it” I’d be very happy.’ Glazer also made Sexy Beast and Birth.

The men lured into the van are not actors. Glazer hid cameras installed in the van and only informed the men afterwards that they were in a movie and asked for permission to use their images.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 derekwinnert.com