Review: Under the Skin
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Jonathan Glazer's first feature in nearly 10 years begins in a way some will call Kubrickian and all will call creepy.
BODY SNATCHER: Scarlett Johansson stars in perhaps the most challenging role of her career as an organ-harvesting alien disguised as a temptress.
City Paper grade: B-
Rising and falling with the temperament of its transfixing heroine, Jonathan Glazer’s first feature in nearly 10 years begins in a way some will call Kubrickian and all will call creepy. After cobbling together a few negligibly normal-sounding syllables, a marble-eyed woman (Scarlett Johansson) stands over the limp body of a young girl against a boundless bone-white void, cataloging her dimensions as if she’s a cadaver on a cold autopsy slab. As she strips her subject and pulls her clothing over her own body, we’re treated to an indiscreet introduction to who Johansson’s “Laura” actually is: a crudely effective alien hunter who’s beginning to grasp that beauty is control on this strange, surface-obsessed planet.
Shuttling between aesthetically ambitious photography and chilling, nearly intrusive guerrilla footage, Glazer decorates a blank box with the sights, sounds and sensibilities of the human experience, filtered through the eyes of a visitor who’s nowhere near human. Yet Under the Skin rarely toes outside its stranger-in-a-strange-land borders to discuss our shortcomings in explicit terms, a deliberate choice that’s both intellectually intriguing and plain frustrating.
Cruising the streets of misty Glasgow in a van, Laura is a coiled cobra in snug jeans and a low-cut top, luring solitary pedestrians — non-actors, their raw reactions recorded with hidden cameras — into the passenger’s side with feminine wiles alone. A quick study of the male libido’s limitations, she has no trouble coaxing victims back to a shack on the outskirts of the city, where they strip naked and sink willingly into another void (this one an ominous black) that harvests their innards, leaving nothing but useless, flimsy dermis behind.
This is one of Glazer’s more overt lecture notes — it’s truly what’s on the inside that counts, especially if you’re an extraterrestrial predator who enjoys snacking on blood and marrow. But the overall thrust of the film, as gorgeous as it is tonally ambiguous, might be too meek to hold the attention of viewers with limited patience for Glazer’s mood-first, plot-second approach.
Taking on what might be the most challenging role of her career, Johansson runs on echoes, reacting, with nearly zero dialogue, to a world that refuses to assist in her assimilation. There is artistic value in many of her explorations, but that doesn’t mean there is virtue in the ambiguity that envelops them.
