Under the Skin (2014)

Under the Skin is one of the most disturbing and simultaneously perplexing movies I’ve ever seen.  I don’t mind being disturbed by a film – indeed, every once in a while, I actively seek out such a moviegoing experience – and there is something quite haunting about the film.  But Under the Skin is ultimately too thin on narrative to be truly effective.

Scarlett Johansson stars as a being (alien?) who drives around in a van picking up stray men and luring them back to her place with the promise of sex.  The abject loneliness of the road and the emotional distance when she eventually kills these men begins to wear on her, and she begins to look for human emotion within herself.

At least, that’s what I think the film is about.  Director Jonathan Glazer and screenwriter Walter Campbell, in what other sources are calling a very loose adaptation of Michael Faber’s eponymous novel, have given us a film that is very highly stylized (and quite engagingly so) but is otherwise compromised by its inability to tell a story that requires the full runtime to tell. 

I would like to commend Glazer and Campbell for not writing a film solely based around the premise of Scarlett Johansson taking her clothes off.  I sense that this is the kind of film that Under the Skin could have become had filmmakers with less interest in filmmaking actually been at the wheel.  I don’t put Glazer in that camp, because it’s apparent that he has something to say about a lot of different themes, but I don’t think he handles these themes especially well.

There are moments in the film that work spectacularly.  The densely metaphorical seduction/murder sequences convey quite imaginatively what is happening through the intense use of visual language, and while we never quite know why Johansson is abducting these men, these sequences communicate in horrifying dread a sense of their ultimate fate.  Indeed, Glazer is ostensibly a master of visual language, able to convey weighty ideas without the use of dialogue. 

Take, for instance, what I see as the pivotal turning point in the film – the interaction between Johansson and a man with neurofibromatosis, in which nothing but Johansson’s performance indicates that her burgeoning compassion for him forces her to spare his life.  It’s a masterful sequence, made all the more powerful by the fact that the actor in question, Adam Pearson, is in fact not an actor at all.

It’s scenes like that one (or the genuinely funny moment when Johansson’s character attempts to eat chocolate cake for the first time) that suggest Glazer has something to say, but in the end Under the Skin never really says anything substantial.  He’s obviously commenting on the nature of sexual predators – the moment when Johansson meets a shady forest patrolman, who asks her the same questions she asked of her prey, indicates as much – but it’s quite unclear what the comment is.  Similarly, the film never quite acknowledges the purpose – or, really, the existence – of the man on the motorcycle who drifts in and out of the film, with some unspoken link to the main character.

I don’t regret seeing Under the Skin, but I’m on the precipice of regret because the film is very nearly incomprehensible.  It does contain several arresting moments, but it isn’t as enjoyably surreal as, say, the work of David Lynch.  While Glazer is a master of silences, the pacing of Under the Skin is more glacial than it needs to be, though it will lodge someplace in the back of your skull for a few days after seeing it as you puzzle through just what it all means.

>Under the Skin is rated R for “graphic nudity, sexual content, some violence and language.”  Several men and women undress fully and are seen naked; though the lighting and cinematography are quite dim, the nudity is unmistakable.  Furthermore, the film deals with themes of seduction, rape, and sex killings, which are seen in disturbing metaphorical visuals with no blood.