Under the Skin

Viewers of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (2014) get to see Scarlett Johannson naked.  But, as they say, there is a price to be paid.  Glazer's film is a gloomy, rebarbative sci-fi picture about an alien predator stalking human beings.  Morose and uncommunicative, the picture is a high-brow version of pulp that you have seen in a thousand different variants -- the beautiful black widow who lures men to their dooms, a kind of high-tech siren or Lorelei.  Fabricated for the purpose of ensnaring men, Johannson's alien tools around Glasgow and adjacent moors in a white van.  She picks up men, interviewing them to determine whether they are without family and alone -- this detail makes no sense because the glamorous alien, at least initially, has no concept of the consequences of her predation, seems to regard an ant that she plucks off the body of one of her victims as equivalent to her human prey, and doesn't make distinctions between skin and clothing, it's all just an outer covering to her.  If the hapless man meets the alien's specifications, she transport her victim to an abandoned house in the suburbs, entices him inside, and, then, immerses her prey in some sort of black, viscid liquid.  The alien can walk on the surface of this liquid, but the victim, pursuing her with penis fully erect, slips into the fluid where he is embalmed in a kind of semi-coma; ultimately, the victims innards are extracted by some occult process, leaving the man a tube of skin, a sort of human-shaped pennant that wriggles disconsolately in the black broth.  The film's emphasis on solitude, loneliness, and darkness -- the interiors where the alien's prey are processed are vast, jet black voids, far larger than the shabby and disheveled homes where the encounter is supposed to be taking place -- seems symbolic in a dreary sort of way.  The highly stylized scenes involving Johannson entrapping her victims in the black syrup have allegorical overtones -- it's as if the victims are sinking into some sort of ebony slough of despond.  (Some critics have found a feminist subtext in the picture:  the predator's stalking of human beings symbolizes, some claim, the way men hunt for sexual prey -- but I don't think this reading really works:  for one thing, the lads that Johannson's creature devours are not particularly sexist or repulsive or macho -- their just ordinary blokes.)  Johannson's alien has a factotum on a motorcycle roaring across the moors and dismal upland highways and, with its sinister but iconic heroine and the helmeted emissary of doom on his motorbike, the movie sometimes seem to be channeling The Man who Fell to Earth (with David Bowie as a similarly opaque space creature) and Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus.  As in The Man who Fell to Earth, the vestigial plot is a variant on "The Little Mermaid" -- the space alien gradually acquires some compassion for human beings and her abstract predatory interest in them becomes tempered with something like affection:  perhaps, she wishes to become a human being herself.  In the end, the poor, lonely space-monster flees to a remote and ghastly-looking forest --  again the imagery is like something from The Faerie Queen or John Bunyan (the forest is full of slit-shaped puddles like half-open eyes and gnarled trees).  In the forest, a bad guy turns the tables on the predator and treats her as prey.  He rapes her and, then, sets her on fire.  Scarlet's sinister motorcycle assistant arrives too late.  By this time, the space creature has molted her comely human form and stands revealed as....as...one of the Blue Man group, but black instead of blue.  On paper, the movie is better and more interesting than it seems on screen.  The theme of disguise versus appearance (surface versus truth) is dramatized by the fact that the glamorous movie actress seems to be hidden in plain sight in the film -- none of her victims seem to recognize that they are dealing with a movie star who is famous throughout the world.  This is an issue because the movie was shot with tiny hidden cameras and most of the blokes that Scarlet's predatory monster encounters are just ordinary Glaswegians.  Street shots and images showing Scarlet in a shopping mall are also filmed with hidden cameras -- no one notices the famous star in their midst.  The movie opts for authenticity on all levels:  the scenes with a grotesquely disfigured young man are not performed with make-up or CGI effects -- the poor fellow is really disfigured.  (The implicit irony is that because Johannson's monster regards all humans as wholly fungible, she doesn't notice that this guy looks startlingly different than her other prey -- the disfigured guy gets the only comical shot in the film:  he pinches himself to determine whether he is dreaming when the predator, blithely indifferent to his hideous appearance, starts to seduce him.)  The use of hidden cameras to film most of the picture doesn't really pay any dividends -- if you didn't watch the featurettes or read reviews like this one, you wouldn't know that the men that the predator interviews and picks up are non-actors who have no idea that they are being stalked by Scarlet Johannson and being filmed in the process; similarly, the viewer would regard the disfigured man as simply a particularly fine and convincing example of the make-up artist's craft.  It seems that the theme of the film, which is, I think, disguise and stealth and concealment, is reflected in the way that the movie was made -- the hidden cameras, the non-actors caught in moment's of candor and yearning, the dim and rainswept Glasgow streets:  all of this is viewed from a covert perspective, from, in fact, the alien's point of view; the movie has a little of glacial, inhuman purity of Michael Haneke's Cache.   But the casual viewer can't distinguished what is staged from what is documentary in this picture because it is all uniformly muted and de-dramatized.  The most effective and wonderful parts of the film are the landscapes:  we see fog-shrouded moors and icy mountains that look like they are on moons of Jupiter, romantic unearthly vistas, and there is a scene on a beach involving enormous waves crashing against a rock-girt coast that is reminiscent of Flaherty's Man of Aran.  In one particularly beautiful shot, the alien lies on her side to sleep cradled in a forest of superimposed trees rocking back and forth in the wind -- it is a wonderfully poetic, if icy, image.  This film is a heroic failure -- nothing in it really works although some of the landscapes are indelible:  a scene in which the naked disfigured man wanders across a moor toward a miserable-looking suburb is like something imagined by William Blake.  The movie was made over a period of ten years and financed by the British Film Institute (the financier of last resort for UK films that are challenging and without commercial prospects -- BFI sponsored Terence Davies' masterpiece, The Long Day Closes), but all of this labor and craft seems to have been in vain:  the movie is neither fish nor fowl -- it's not lurid and scary enough (and its effects are too strange) to be successful as a thriller or a horror film, and, at the same time, it's too pulpy and predictable to be effective as an art-house picture.