UNDER THE SKIN

UNDER THE SKIN takes the familiar idea of an alien observing humanity and strips away almost everything you’d normally expect from science fiction.

Scarlett Johansson plays an unnamed woman driving through Glasgow, approaching solitary men and drawing them back to an isolated house. At first, the pattern seems clear. Then the film begins to shift. Her encounters become less mechanical when her curiosity is aroused, and the distance between observer and observed begins to collapse.

Jonathan Glazer built much of the film around real locations and hidden-camera encounters with members of the public, many of whom didn’t initially know they were appearing in a feature film. That decision gives the Glasgow sequences a documentary texture that sits uneasily beside the film’s abstract interiors and unnerving visual effects. Johansson’s performance is deliberately restrained, relying on observation, gesture and tiny changes in behaviour as her character begins to register the world around her differently.

Before moving into feature films, Glazer built his reputation directing commercials and music videos, including Radiohead’s STREET SPIRIT and KARMA POLICE and the celebrated Guinness SURFER advertisement. That background in highly controlled visual storytelling is still visible in UNDER THE SKIN, where image, sound and movement often carry more information than dialogue.

And speaking of sound, Mica Levi’s score is central to the experience. Strings bend and repeat in patterns that feel seductive one moment and threatening the next, giving the film a physical, almost visceral tension. 

UNDER THE SKIN was divisive on release, but its reputation has grown considerably. It’s now widely regarded as one of the defining science fiction films of the 2010s, less interested in explaining its mythology than in looking at human behaviour from the outside. Desire, loneliness, violence and vulnerability all become unfamiliar when seen through a character who is only beginning to understand them.