Under the Skin (2013)

The premise of Under The Skin is simple: an alien visits Earth and preys upon single men. But what director Jonathan Glazer does with this premise is amazingly creative. First, in making the alien female, Glazer inverts the normatively gendered relation between predator and prey that underpins so many other films. Instead of women alone at night signifying as potential victims, now it is men walking alone who are under threat. One might think that casting a glamorous A-list star like Scarlett Johansson as the alien would work against this inversion, and in some ways it does. To the extent that the alien’s victims are so willing to go off with her because of Johansson’s conventional beauty, the film reinforces rather than subverts conventional ideas about sexuality and desire, rather than reworking them. But to leave the analysis there would be unfair to the excellence of Johansson’s acting. She gives an amazingly restrained and controlled performance, saying very little and emoting even less (which is doubtless why she did not win all the awards she deserved for this role). Part of the reason for this technique is to stress that she needs to do very little to ensnare her victims—these men are so cocksure (I choose this term deliberately!) that it never occurs to them that they could be in danger until it is too late. But the main reason Johansson exhibits such a limited range of emotions and facial expressions is to enable us to see our familiar world through the alien’s eyes. Because we receive no cues from the alien about how she is reacting to what she sees, everything familiar is rendered strange, enabling us to see it as if for the first time (although I must say that, as a British ex-pat living in America, I received the images of Glasgow through the lens of nostalgia, and didn’t really experience any estrangement). Were the film to finish here, it would be a very interesting take on some sci-fi conventions (especially as used by Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth) but not much more than that. But then the second part of the film begins, and that’s where Under The Skin becomes something extraordinary. The alien picks up her latest victim, who happens to have a facial neurofibromatosis. As one might expect, Glazer plays with the idea that both of these beings are, in a sense, alienated from the environment around them, but fortunately he does not stop there. After taking this man back to her house, where she has delivered her other victims, something happens to the alien, a shift in consciousness that is never articulated or explained, but that makes her let the man go and stop her search for further victims. At this point of the film, several things become clear: the alien has been accompanied by a motorcyclist from the beginning of the film, who appears to assist her, but who in fact we come to feel is supervising or even controlling her; he captures the man she releases and makes frantic attempts to find (hunt down?) the alien when she walks away from what amounts to her job. We also realize that the alien is, in some ways, as much a victim as the men she has been capturing; ever since the opening scene of the film (we realize retrospectively) she has been unable to exercise any free choice about who she is and what she does, and her attempts to ‘fit in’ to the simultaneously human and utterly alien world in which she finds herself are (sometimes comedically) hopeless. This is where the casting of a female actress in the role of the alien begins to signify differently and even more powerfully. If anyone felt that the inversion of the normatively gendered predator-prey distinction in the first half of the film was a little too tidy and glib, one cannot possibly say the same about the closing section of the film. By the time the alien dies, the phrase ‘under the skin’ has acquired multiple layers of meaning and we are left to process the meaning of what we have just seen. To say all this is only to scratch the surface of this extraordinary film—I haven’t even mentioned its moving and powerful score, and the images that feel like they’ve been burned into your head: the crying toddler on the beach, the point of view shot from one of the victims as the alien walks away above him, the simultaneously comic and tragic instance of coitus interruptus, and most of all, the alien’s last moments as she kneels on the floor of the forest: all of these moments and many more will stay with you long after the film has finished.