Under the Skin channels Kubrick’s disturbing sense of the alien, mesmerizing the viewer in a voyeuristic echo of the way Scarlett Johansson’s character lures her the loners she encounters to her.

I caught a showing of Under the Skin recently while visiting my nephew Jon at college in Austin. On the one hand he wasn’t in love with the minimalist science fiction flick, despite the exposure of Scarlett Johansson’s titular assets, but after walking back from the art house we saw it at to the co-op he’s living in, he allowed that it had managed to provide an hour’s worth of discussion. So that’s something.

Set in Scotland, both urban and rural, amidst pervasive mist and rain, Scarlett Johansson’s alien wrapped in human flesh prowls the streets, backroads, and beaches looking for unattached males to entice back to her place. When you put it that way, it sounds more like a serial killer movie than science fiction, and you can look at it that way too, because the challenge presented to the audience is to get inside the creature’s head to understand what’s going on. There’s no FBI profiler explaining the parameters that lump her victims into a tidy package which exposes the psychological underpinnings of the killer offered up. Instead, the script gives us as little information as possible, forcing us to watch the glacial flow of scenes intently so as not to miss the little clues. You will, by the way.

Miss Johansson’s performance is dead on. Between interactions with potential victims she looks out over the landscape with un-actualized skin, her face a perfectly composed blank as her eyes track the pedestrians she sees from her nondescript cargo van. Only when she engages a target does she shift into human aspect, suddenly becoming an attractive, yet non-threatening youngish woman without any special agenda, except to make some sort of human connection. Her conversation with the lone males she targets are interrogations, but ones delivered in a tone of sympathetic interest, and since there’s no bright light shining in the victims faces, no stiff backed chair and one way mirror, there’s little reason for them to suspect that the woman giving them a lift isn’t what she appears.

Except for the stark improbability of the encounter. But speaking from personal experience, the chance that an attractive woman might be interested in you tends to suppress a whole lot of reasoning ability.

The presentation of the film’s story has a starkness to it that immediately recalls Kubrick, either in the opening sequence of 2001 a Space Odyssey, or his later Clockwork Orange, and audiences may think that it’s a new story, especially after having been fed a steady diet of action and adventure in the familiar structure laid down in Hollywood’s story bible. Actually, it’s a very familiar tale. The alien, like the unattached men it preys on, is disassociated from humanity, and the crisis it faces is its gradual association to it as her interaction with each victim gets a little more, pardon me, under her skin. For the audience, the question shifts from what she’s up to, to what impact its going to have on her, if any.

The film’s path takes us on another interesting journey, as we encounter a broad spectrum of unattached men, all adult to middle age, all disassociated from humanity to some degreee, thus providing a mirror for the alien and a yardstick for the viewer. What I find interesting about the men is their general acceptance of their aloneness. With little exception, they’re not aggressive towards the lone woman giving them a ride in the isolated country, and it’s her advances that bring them to her. Generally the men are helpful and respectful, though their need for connection, emotional or physical, can overcome those constraints. They’ve subjugated their needs, but they’re still there, just below the surface.

For tales of the misanthrope, we know the challenge will be for someone to break through their defenses, for the sociopath, it’s more often that they will be brought into society through external controls. In “Under the Skin,” the question is whether the alien has a capacity for humanity and what the consequences will be if she does, or doesn’t.

Links / References

• Official Site: http://undertheskinmovie.com/