That not-particularly-obscure object of desire: "Under The Skin"

 This account con­tains some plot details, although I’ve tried to por­tray those details, and their import, as obliquely as pos­sible. I would­n’t call them “spoil­ers” but you nev­er can tell these days. Be warned.

Critics have been call­ing Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin “mys­ter­i­ous,” “mes­mer­iz­ing,” “elu­sive,” and “hyp­not­ic,” and it is argu­ably all of those things. It is also at times ter­ri­fy­ing, at oth­er times delib­er­ately ennerv­at­ing (I think), and finally har­row­ing. One of the things that makes it pos­sibly a mas­ter­piece is the way it acheives all of the above qual­it­ies. In many respects Under The Skin is an entirely con­ven­tion­al film. It rep­res­ents  a rudi­ment­ary and per­haps even exem­plary cine­mat­ic nar­rat­ive by present­ing the view­er with a series of events, depic­ted in the order in which they wuld have occured had they happened in “real life.” 

This is true, I think, even of the open­ing shots, a mont­age that recalls imagery from the Jupiter voy­age sequences in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The action depic­ted looks rather like one would ima­gine a space­ship dock­ing, or a futur­ist­ic piece of machinery per­form­ing some sort of task of align­ment. Because of that, it’s rather a shock when the mont­age con­cludes with a clos­eup of what seems to be the iris and pupil and white mat­ter of a human eye­ball. Only the white mat­ter is almost too white. This image, too, recalls the Kubrick film but it also sug­gests that what we’ve been watch­ing lead­ing up to it has been depic­ted at some kind of macro level. But once that human eye is recog­niz­able, the view­er might feel more sub­sequently groun­ded. And indeed, things start hap­pen­ing in a world that we can recog­nize as more or less our own, or, as Scotland, which is where the movie is set and was shot. A man on a motor­cycle driv­ing at night pulls off the the side of the road next to a white van. He parks the bike, goes down a flight of stairs off the road­side, and emerges soon after car­ry­ing what appears to be a human corpse. So far, so com­pre­hens­ible. The action then shifts to what appears to be the interi­or of a room-sized box encased in white light. A nude woman in sil­hou­ette removes the clothes from the corpse and puts them on her­self. This is weird, all right, but there’s noth­ing in the film’s gram­mar to indic­ate that this sequence is tak­ing place out of tem­por­al or spa­tial con­tinu­ity with the pre­vi­ous scene. Once we see Scarlett Johansson driv­ing the white van from the road­side scene shortly after this, we are all “agreed,” via our under­stand­ing of film gram­mar, that some sort of trans­form­a­tion has been accomplished. 

The movie’s per­spect­ive is con­fined to that of the creatures, whatever they are, por­trayed by Johansson and the fel­low on the motor­cycle, and the oth­er identically-dressed fel­lows on motor­cycles who turn up at what is ostens­ibly the movie’s cli­max. There is no out­side, human fig­ure to provide expos­i­tion. There’s no gov­ern­ment agency track­ing the activ­it­ies of Johansson’s char­ac­ter. Her activ­it­ies, as you’ve likely already read, involve driv­ing her van slowly through the streets of Glasgow, speak­ing to vari­ous anorak-clad young men, and depend­ing on their walk­ing des­tin­a­tions and/or mar­it­al status and such, lur­ing them back to her “place.” The place, such as it is, seems an end­less black cor­ridor with a reflect­ive glass floor. Here’s where the movie’s nar­rat­ive strategy, its ellipses and/or elisions, its choice con­cern­ing what kind of inform­a­tion it’s going to provide, either bene­fits its mis­sion or, as you’ve seen in some neg­at­ive reviews,  maddens/addles the view­er. (Although maddening/addling the view­er may well be its mis­sion in a sense.) Once inside, none of the fel­lows ever observe, “This is a weird apart­ment” or any such thing. They merely fol­low the char­ac­ter played by Johansson as she strips of her clothes, and strip down them­selves, even as they sink into the floor. Now don’t get me wrong. Ms. Johansson is a very attract­ive woman, but even were she intent on sedu­cing me—not a likely scen­ario, admittedly—I would likely make some com­ment were she to bring me to such a loc­ale. I’d at least want to hit the bath­room to see if I had any­thing in my teeth. So what’s with these guys? Are they that thick? Are they lit­er­ally hyp­not­ized? Are they see­ing somethng else? We do not know. 

Nor do we know, later on, exactly why one of her poten­tial vic­tims does not sink. Although we are cer­tainly invited to guess. What’s finally most ter­ri­fy­ing about the film is the matter-of-fact way it treats bizarre, hor­rif­ic actions, and the some­times chilling, some­times poignant blank­ness of its lead character—it simply won’t do to call her a “heroine” or even to call her a “her”—with such utter matter-of-factness. It is very much a movie with a begin­ning, a middle, and a shud­der­ing end.