Under the Skin is the most bizarro movie of the year so far – by a long shot. A space alien in the form of a human woman attracts men sexually and then harvests their bodies. As each man steps forward, entranced in lust, he doesn’t notice that he is sinking into an ever deeper black pool until he vanishes. Later, we learn that he is suspended in the viscous liquid until, suddenly, his body is deflated like a popped balloon, leaving just the latex-like skin, while a red pulp (presumably pulverized human bone and tissue) heads up on a conveyor belt to the aliens for their use. This lurid story is set in the gloomy dank of Scotland and yo-yos between the gritty streets of Glasgow and a highly stylized sci-fi world a la Solaris.
Scarlett Johansson, who puts the lure in allure, plays the alien who any heterosexual man would crawl on his knees across broken glass for. Scarlett is a helluva good sport. Johansson is that rare A-list movie star who doesn’t take herself too seriously and has VERY good taste. You can’t criticize her for picking up a paycheck in the occasional comic book movie when you consider a body of top-tier work that is remarkable for a 29-year-old: Ghost World, Lost in Translation, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Match Point, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Her. Here, she is suitably sensual and perfectly nails the alien’s changing degree of emotional detachment/attachment, which is really the core of the movie (I think). And she gets naked several times.
Director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) co-wrote the screenplay with Walter Campbell from a Michael Faber novel. This is NOT a movie for those who need to know what is going on at all times. And, to connect the dots the best we can, we have to sit through some VERY repetitive action.
Again and again, the alien drives around Glasgow, scanning hundreds of men, asking the ones with the most unintelligible accents for directions and picking up the single ones. This happens a lot. She has an alien handler in the form of a human man dressed in motorcycle gear, who strides around with aggressive purposefulness and speeds around the Scottish back roads on his bike and never speaks. This happens a lot, too.
Under the Skin is getting critical praise (currently a Metacritic score of 77), which I attribute to its novel look and overall trippiness and to its being the first movie in three months that challenges the audience. But overall, the payoff isn’t really worth watching the repetition, trying to figure out what’s going on and why.
SPOILER ALERT: As an alien people-harvester, she is initially emotionally uninvolved with humans. She has no reaction to a family beach tragedy that would highly disturb a human. Dragged into a disco, she is disoriented until some poor guy chats her up and she can lapse into the role she was trained/programmed for.
But then she picks up an Elephant Man for harvesting; she is touched by his longing for companionship and sex – and ends up letting him go. Another man shows her kindness and she tries out humanity, tapping her fingers to human music, trying a bite of chocolate cake (and spitting it out, gagging). She attaches to the kind man but finds herself biologically unequipped to take the relationship to a new level.
And there are some holes in the story. If this alien race is so advanced, why can’t her handler find her with some GPS-like capacity? Why don’t the aliens harvest more people, and why do they just pick the solitary loners? Why don’t they consume the skin? But that’s just thinking too much about Under the Skin.