Review: Under the Skin (2014)
2nd in a 3-part series of Scarlett Johannson science fiction films of the early 2010s
Under the Skin (2014)
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
If you didn't know anything about this movie going in -- which was impossible at the time of its release, since there was a buzz about it -- you would find it completely incomprehensible. It felt like I was 10 years old again and watching "2001: A Space Odyssey" for the first time. (Granted, we were late for the movie and only entered during the scene when the Pan Am spacecraft was docking at the space station, but I'm certain that if I had been watching it from the beginning I would have been just as perplexed.) Set against a frenetic, gibbering soundtrack, during the first five minutes geometric lines and circles turn into an eye. There's a waterfall, and a landscape with a white dot, revealed to be a motorcycle, coming down a curving rural road.
Previously in this series examining Scarlett Johannson in science fiction:
Iron Man 2 (2010)
The motorcycle stops in a more urban area with streetlights near a white van parked on the roadside. Its rider retrieves a limp female body nearby and carries it to the van. Then we see the same female body's head; the body is lying supine against a white background. A naked woman strips the body of its clothing and puts it on. Having done so, she stands (on four-inch heels) looking down at it. Now the face seems to be looking back at her, and a tear falls from its left eye -- so, not dead after all? The now-clothed woman bends down and seems to scrape something from the now-naked body: a small insect from the shadowy roadside from which the body was retrieved by the motorcyclist, who is nowhere to be seen. In fact, this exchange of clothing takes place entirely in a quiet, over-exposed pure white environment; where are they? Who are they?
Next scene: two high buildings stand in fog, and at the top of the taller one, lights diverge and disappear. Do the lights suggest that the next shot, which shows the woman descending a tall building's stairs, means that the woman was somehow aboard some vehicle which dropped her at the top of the building she is now descending? Next shot: the white van standing at the foot of a tall apartment building that is apparently about to be demolished; the man seen before is wheeling his motorcycle out of the van. He rides off down the road as the woman gets behind the wheel of the van and drives away. After buying some red lipstick at a mall, she then, for the next 30 or 40 minutes of the film, drives aimlessly around the Scottish countryside trying to pick up men. Some of them she takes back to what looks like an abandoned house, where she leads them into a black void into which they vanish, like that Star Trek: Next Generation episode where Tasha Yar disappears into a monstrous oil slick. This is the only purposeful action taken by the mysterious woman, played by Johannson with a blank yet intense expression: she seduces men into a black void.
So, without any further means to explain to themselves what is going on, the viewer is left to make up a story for themselves.
Here's one story: A woman dying on a roadside dreams that in death her clothing is unceremoniously stripped from her and donned by her next incarnation, but her new incarnation can only lead others into blackness and death. Another version: After dreaming of being stripped and abandoned by an alter ego (who wears her clothes but has a hipper haircut), a woman meets her boyfriend, who has bought her a shitty white rape van for her job as a courier. She goes about her job always getting lost and misdirected by men, some of whom she fucks out of sheer boredom, but sex isn't satisfying.
Or you could adopt the version held by previous critics -- perhaps the one contained in the novel on which the movie is based: the two people, the motorcyclist and the woman who puts on the clothes of some unfortunate road-accident victim are space aliens, and when she draws earthmen into the black void it serves some inscrutable space alien purpose. We try to fit this into space alien tropes, such as that the victims are somehow consumed by the aliens, even though there's nothing in the film to suggest this.
But no matter which version of the story you invent to explain the actual events of the film, this message is clear: a woman who voluntarily seduces men does so for selfish and apparently violent reasons; her victims do not come back from the encounter, while she is unchanged by it. Not that she fails to change throughout the movie; after an incident in she trips and faceplants on an urban sidewalk, then is helped to her feet by solicitous bystanders who ask nothing of her except whether she is all right, she seems to look at people a different way. After that, when she finds herself on familiar territory with a man, instead of drowning him she assents to having sex -- although the actual moment of intercourse seems to startle her badly. This reaction favors the space alien version of the story, or perhaps one in which she is, more ordinarily, a victim of trauma. The limp body on the roadside at the film's beginning, the blindingly white scene in which she is stripped and examined, suggests a rape victim who subsequently lives out a life of revenge.
It is hard to judge Johannson's performance as an actor in a film in which she speaks little and performs few everyday actions. It's true that she is successful in displaying the few emotions her character is permitted: blankness, boredom, low-level flirtatiousness, or confusion. No doubt a worse actor would have allowed some unwanted, distracting feeling or facial movement -- but this isn't saying much. To form a stronger opinion I would either have to watch her do things which aren't part of the film, or to have the movie explained to me. And I think it's better to see this confounding film with as few preconceived notions as possible and form, based only on what's presented, your own version of the story.
Click below to subscribe to my Substack for free. Film reviews several times a week delivered to your inbox. I’ll never charge you to read them.