8 / 10
Under the Skin is among the most uncompromising science fiction films of the 2010s, and it’s deeply divisive. Jonathan Glazer directed. Walter Campbell co-wrote with Glazer, loosely adapting Michel Faber’s 2000 novel. Scarlett Johansson plays an unnamed alien woman who drives a white van through Scotland picking up unsuspecting men, who she then leads to a black void that consumes them. The film runs one hundred and eight minutes. The dialogue is minimal.
Most of the men in the early sequences are non-actors recruited from Scottish public streets through hidden cameras. Some of them didn’t know they were in a film until production approached them afterward.
Few films have unsettled me the way this one does. It’s cold, slow and strange, and I think it comes closer than anything else in the genre to showing what a human being might look like to something that isn’t one. It’s an 8 because I admire it enormously and, in its slowest stretches, also find it a test of my patience.
The film made approximately seven million dollars on a thirteen million dollar budget.
It was a commercial disappointment that now ranks among the most-respected art house science fiction films of its decade. The film polarizes audiences. Some viewers consider it a masterpiece. Others find it tedious and pretentious. Both responses are defensible. The film is what it is.
The Hidden Camera Sequences
The film’s most distinctive production choice was the use of hidden cameras to capture Scarlett Johansson’s character interacting with real people on Scottish streets.
Johansson, made up to be less immediately recognizable as Scarlett Johansson, would approach men in her white van and ask for directions. The men didn’t know they were being filmed. If they were willing to chat, the camera continued. If they weren’t, the van moved on.
The technique produced footage that no scripted approach could have generated.
The men’s reactions are genuine. Their conversational rhythms are uncalibrated. Their willingness to engage with an unfamiliar attractive woman in a van varies in ways that reveal something about how men respond to such situations. The film is partly an anthropological document about Scottish masculinity. The filmmakers notified the men after filming and gave them the chance to remove their footage. Most consented.
I find those scenes hard to turn away from and a little queasy. The men are funny, lonely and awkward in ways no actor would dare play, and I can’t watch them without wondering how I’d have come across answering a stranger’s question through a van window.
For Writers
Unscripted footage of real people behaves differently from scripted dialogue between actors. Under the Skin captured Scottish men in their unguarded moments. The film couldn’t have written the dialogue that emerged. The lesson is that some kinds of truth in fiction can only be obtained through methods that bend the rules of traditional narrative. The cost is ethical complexity. The benefit is naturalism no scripted approach can produce.
The Void
The alien leads her victims to a black void where they undress, walk forward into liquid, and are absorbed. The visual rendering of these sequences is the film’s strongest formal achievement. The void is pure black. The men appear to walk into a surface that should be solid but isn’t. They sink below the surface. The film shows their bodies floating in the liquid with the surface still intact above them. It stages the choreography so the audience can’t quite track the mechanics. The effect is uncanny.
A much-quoted sequence involves two men in the void who are floating in different stages of liquefaction.
One of them touches the other’s hand. The other’s body breaks apart silently into floating organs and skin. The sequence is shot without sound effects or score. The audience watches without commentary. The horror is delivered without explanation.
That touch of the hand horrifies me more than any jump scare I can name, and there isn’t a sound in it.
For Writers
Silence can be more terrifying than sound when the visual content is sufficient. Under the Skin’s void sequences are mostly silent. The lack of musical cues forces the audience to engage with the images directly. The lesson is that audio cues tell the audience how to feel. Removing them forces the audience to construct their own emotional response. Silence isn’t the absence of sound design. Silence is a creative choice that produces its own effects.
Scarlett Johansson
Johansson has rarely been as committed as she is here. The role required her to play a being who’s gradually developing human feeling without ever fully achieving it. The early scenes show the alien as efficient, predatory, and emotionally absent. The middle of the film shows the gradual onset of curiosity. The third act shows the alien beginning to feel emotions she doesn’t know what to do with.
The performance is delivered largely through small physical adjustments. The alien’s body language changes as the film goes on, her face holds expressions slightly longer, and her responses to physical sensation start to register.
Johansson plays the transformation without underlining it, and I think it’s the bravest work she’s done, because the film gives her almost no dialogue to lean on. The audience either reads the change or doesn’t, and the film won’t help.
For Writers
A character whose interior life is gradually emerging is one of the harder things to depict in fiction. Under the Skin tracks the alien’s emerging humanity through small physical changes instead of through dialogue or voice-over. The lesson is that change in a character doesn’t require announcement. Show the small physical adjustments. The reader will read the interior change without being told it’s happening. Underlining the transformation usually weakens it.
Craft Note
The hidden-camera Glasgow sequences are the film’s most distinctive craft. Jonathan Glazer’s use of unscripted public footage with Scarlett Johansson in disguise produced a docu-fiction look that no other 2010s science fiction film attempted. Science fiction can borrow documentary methods to make the alien protagonist’s outsider perspective feel outside.
Is Under the Skin worth watching?
8/10. It’s uncompromising, Johansson has rarely been better, and the void sequences are the images from this film I can’t shake. The 8 comes from the pace. There are stretches in the middle where I admire what Glazer is doing more than I enjoy sitting through it, and a film this confident could have lost ten minutes without losing anything. Watch it knowing what kind of film you’re signing up for, and give it your full attention.
