Under the Skin

One of the most stun­ning, trau­ma­tis­ing moments of mor­bid­i­ty in Under the Skin has noth­ing to do with Venus fly­trap aliens, but with the wretched­ness of Scot­tish weath­er. What starts out as a sun­ny day on a beach for a pic­nick­ing cou­ple with baby in tow results in four deaths: after their dog gets caught up in the cur­rent, the wife tries to res­cue it, but gets caught in the cur­rent her­self as the wind sud­den­ly picks up. Her hus­band sees her dis­tress, and jumps in too. He fares no better.

A Czech tourist (who briefly flirts with Scar­lett Johanns­son, our mur­der­ous pro­tag­o­nist) man­ages with tremen­dous effort to drag the hus­band back to shore, but he imme­di­ate­ly turns back around in pur­suit of the wife. While the tourist lies on the beach recov­er­ing from the strug­gle, Johanns­son – who has blankly wit­nessed all of this from about five metres away – saun­ters over and bash­es his head in with a rock, then drags his corpse across the rocky beach back to her van. The couple’s baby, too small to stand, can only scream against the crash­ing waves at the prospect of being aban­doned; lat­er that night, the baby cries no less intense­ly as Johannsson’s assis­tant (Jere­my McWilliams, who is sim­ply known as ​“The Bad Man”) returns to pick up the tow­els they left behind.

How quick­ly this dis­as­ter esca­lates. Its icy mat­ter-of-fact­ness, and Johannsson’s trans­for­ma­tion from cal­cu­lat­ing, idle voyeur to clever oppor­tunist, is emblem­at­ic of the film at large. Atmos­phere wins out over expli­ca­tion or intri­cate plot­ting. Favour­ing vis­cer­al abstrac­tions and sump­tu­ous images which hark back to the best of his ​“weird” mid-’90s music videos, Under the Skin also shies away from a tra­di­tion­al three-act struc­ture, exist­ing in two parts, the first of which is an extend­ed social exper­i­ment. Tool­ing around Glas­gow in her white Tran­sit van, her ​“use­ful” encoun­ters, which result in tak­ing a male vic­tim back to her place for what can be best described as ​“depulp­ing”, are out­num­bered by polite chats that go nowhere in par­tic­u­lar. Only the most lad­dish, tats ​’n’ six-pack abs boys actu­al­ly flirt back.

This nar­cis­sism is evi­dent in the means of their destruc­tion. The pitch-black inte­ri­or of her lair is slight­ly reflec­tive and, as she strips off her clothes, they proud­ly fol­low behind her, as if they were strut­ting down a cat­walk, obliv­i­ous to the fate that awaits them just a few feet ahead. Of course, this stage wouldn’t have been pos­si­ble unless Johanns­son hadn’t trad­ed in the ben­e­fits of a three-point light­ing sys­tem and Pho­to­Shop for a crunchy black wig and red lip­stick. She is a movie star with above-aver­age looks, but here she’s required to go unno­ticed in Glasgow’s shop­ping dis­trict and slip away silent­ly from too-obvi­ous a crime. She’s also brave enough to invite com­plete strangers into her van.

It’s these ques­tions of per­ceiv­ing and devel­op­ing a sense of self and how women exist in West­ern soci­ety that shifts the sto­ry into a dif­fer­ent gear. After pick­ing up a man who escapes from her clutch­es, she takes a long look in a mir­ror, and then runs away to a remote town in the High­lands. No longer bur­dened by the need to hunt or engage in small talk, she takes small steps to under­stand human­i­ty, and sub­se­quent­ly expe­ri­ences the heights of human kind­ness and love and the worst of human vio­lence and cruelty.

Whether or not her depar­ture from Glas­gow is moti­vat­ed by remorse, bore­dom, curios­i­ty or capri­cious­ness remains unclear, for Under the Skin oper­ates under the assump­tion that even if a lion could talk, we could not under­stand what she said. These semi-Lacan­ian ​“mir­ror phase” moments, where she fur­ther explores her body, nei­ther ful­ly human nor alien, don’t feel sen­su­al, humor­ous or clin­i­cal. She is still sim­ply try­ing to process her expe­ri­ences, unable to yet artic­u­late a hypoth­e­sis. Though the film’s dom­i­nant themes are lone­li­ness and ten­sion, its con­clud­ing note is one of frus­trat­ed exis­ten­tial incom­plete­ness: what­ev­er she was mov­ing towards is pre­ma­ture­ly snatched away, if it ever could’ve been reached at all.

The spec­trum of human behav­iour is stud­ied through a series of small, silent moments in these lat­ter scenes – fid­dling with the radio knob while wash­ing the dish­es or eat­ing a piece of cake. The beau­ty of these asides only inten­si­fies in con­trast to the abstract visu­al effects and fan­tas­ti­cal moments. Mica Levi’s orches­tral score, full of shriek­ing glis­san­dos and two-step beats, forms a sin­gu­lar­i­ty between inter­na­tion­al art house and big bud­get sci­ence-fic­tion fare. Per­haps it’s because some audi­ences are unable or unwill­ing to make sense of some­thing that invests so much in visu­al sto­ry­telling, but it’s a shame there aren’t more films like this.