I will try purely because my gut feeling is that it will feel like a critical injustice to commit my thoughts on Glazer's film into words after three or four sittings. And though three or four sittings will surely come, now is as good a time as any.
Do I start with the primordial soundscape as Glazer does? Or with the pretty woman who materialises? Her cheap fur coat. Her cheaper lipstick. Her ragged wig? The nondescript van she scans the streets from? Do I start with the men she picks up? With how lonely, how unconnected, how horny they are? Do I start with how she leaves them? Extruded. Exuviated. Do I start with how she returns to the streets? With how she is imperceptibly altered?
Or do I just suggest you throw yourself on Glazer's mercy?
Under the Skin swirls like dangerous molasses. It doesn't have a starting point. It doesn't have a foothold. Its only anchor is the woman, and even she, a cold-eyed reproduction of Scarlett Johansson, defies identification. She is a femme fatale, a lethal honey-pot, driven by nothing but instinct.
She looks upon us as alien, something to be studied, a set of weaknesses to be exploited. She preys on men's desires, their appetites and their bodies. But in their lust she also sees their tenderness. She sees their humanity. And what she sees she begins to feel. And what she feels she begins to desire. Stepping down from the top of the food chain, she inevitably discovers our fragile social ecosystem is not at all forgiving.
Glazer is film maker on an fascinating trajectory. His first feature, Sexy Beast, stood out amidst the mouthy British crime dramas of the late nineties through its sun-blasted visuals, but it was his Kidman-starring follow-up that proved what the director was capable of. Filmed with Kubrickian detachment, Birth presented Kidman with the reincarnated soul of her dead husband in the form of a ten year old boy and was a triumph of otherworldly, almost gothic, tone. Now, nine years later, Glazer steps even further into the esoteric.
Everything in Under the Skin is recognisable but everything in Under the Skin is completely alien. Through the woman, Glazer provides a disconcerting feedback loop on humanity, and his is a truthful lens. The bulk of the cast of the film were not even aware they were on a film set. This naturalism is integral to the film's tone, as is the unforgiving Scottish terrain. With the help of the Johansson and an assured score by first time film composer Mica Levi, Glazer twists the familiar into impossibly tensile enigma. He presents our world as an uncharted planet and every interaction is open for reevaluation. Our relationships with each other, our relationship with nature and our relationship with ourselves all come under the microscope. The experience is wondrously terrifying and, unexpectedly, deeply affecting.
If you are going to see Under the Skin, and I strongly recommend you do, go in prepared for a visual and aural assault. Go in prepared for an eerily esoteric take on humanity. Go in prepared for an hour and a half of Scarlett Johansson, stripped of her stardom, bravely wrestling with Scotland's alien landscape. But know that you cannot go in expecting anything you will have experienced at your local cinema before. That is, unless your local cinema is one of those attached to an art museum.
Steel yourself for something out of the ordinary. And block out a couple of days to process it afterwards.
Haunting.
★★★★ (and growing)
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