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. Continue reading
