Under the Skin (2013)
Nursing a headache, a common symptom of my annual winter malady, I looked for something relaxing to watch. I ended up (re)watching Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) which might sound like an odd choice for relaxation, given it is a disturbing horror sci-fi, but it’s also probably the closest any film has gotten to matching the experience of ambient music. It has minimal dialogue, no scenes of exposition whatsoever, the sound itself is muffled as if heard from the other side of wall, the soundtrack a spacey ambient composed by Mica Levi. It cured my headache.
The plot: an alien lifeform has taken human form, that form here played by Scarlett Johansson, and is roaming the streets of Scotland on a mission to lure people to remote locations to, seemingly, harvest their innards. For food or research maybe, it’s never made clear1. Because the form the alien takes is an attractive woman, all of the targets are men. Often men ‘she’ meets while driving around in a utility van. When there is some sort of crime scene left afterwards - witnesses, bodies etc. - a man, who we’ll call ‘the courier’ for ease, likely also a disguised alien, travels there on a motorbike and cleans things up.
Scarlett Johansson can’t help but be an anarchronistic presence driving around Scotland. But her otherworldliness makes narrative sense: she is an alien’s idea of a perfectly sculpted human body. Johansson is almost anonymous in how beautiful she is. She speaks in a posh southern-English accent - a filmic pet peeve of mine is I hate when actors do accents, unless it’s for comedy, but again here the artifice makes sense, it is not a natural accent but a simulated ‘generic human voice’. Everything about Johansson’s performance is slightly fake, stilted, stands out in rainy, mundane Scotland, but the men she meets are so mesmerised they don’t question any of it.
The only other time I saw the film was in 2013 when I was 17. Most of the film passed me by. I watched it expecting a typical horror-slasher flick only with an arty sci-fi skin. And its first half can be watched this way, whereas the second half is nonsensical if watched this way. (Here’s your spoiler warning.) The turning point is when the alien seduces a man with facial deformities, played by Adam Pearson, brings him back to her usual spot, but inexplicably lets him go. The courier immediately rushes to the man and bundles him into the boot of a car and then begins to track the protagonist, who runs away into the Scottish highlands. In the final sequence the alien falls asleep in an abandoned building in the woods and wakes up being sexually assaulted by a man. The alien runs, chased by the man, the alien’s skin-disguise gets ripped off revealing its real body (or is this another suit, which it sort of looks like?). The man pours petrol over the alien and burns it dead.
The second half of Under the Skin, the part that passed younger me by, is more sad than scary. Why does the alien let the man go? It is because here is someone as lonely as itself? Someone else trapped in a body that separates them from other people? The alien’s attempt to escape is clearly futile. Where could it go? It could maybe live the rest of its life incognito as a human - but any hopes like this are dashed when the alien sits in a restaurant and eats a dessert, its first taste of Earth food, and immediately throws up. It’s body is too different. The restaurant-full of people barely hide their stares of disgust and embarrasment. It’s as lonely a moment as ever depicted on film.
In the film’s second half the anonymous, ruthless, seemingly invulnerable killer is shown to be a victim too, trapped in a disguise-body, trapped on Earth, trapped doing this horrible work, either through job or slavery.
I imagine most people will see Under the Skin as a cold film. It is never generous with the audience, there is no exposition, so the story flows organically without any edges or contours visible. We never know the alien’s thoughts or feelings, i.e. we never get any glimpse ‘under the skin’. It is a character denied any interiority. We could easily miss that this being has any subjectivity at all. I’ve referred to the alien as ‘it’ throughout because we don’t know its true gender, or if this alien race even has gender in the way humans do. We don’t know its name, backstory, the reason it does what it does. We might flip this too and wonder what story the alien tells itself to so easily kill humans. To commit evil deeds one needs a story to justify them. Does the alien believe humans aren’t sentient beings? What is it about the lonely man with facial deformities that breaks through this story?
Glazer has only directed one film since, the equally brilliant The Zone of Interest, a fictionalised account of real-life Nazi Rudolf Hoss, which on the surface might not seem to share any thematic similarities with Under the Skin. But The Zone of Interest is also about people who are increasingly disconnected from their subjectivity. The difference is The Zone of Interest presents people who want to be free of their subjectivity. The Hoss family lives just outside the walls of the Auschwitz camp, but what happens in the camp is never depicted, most of the film is made up of domestic scenes of the Hoss family. We hear the sounds of the camp and its horrors but never see them, like an unconscious object trying to burrow its way to the surface. These were people who wanted to be embedded into a system, wanted to be indistinguishable from the whole.
Under the Skin portrays the opposite. The alien protagonist is stuck inside just such a system. It’s a film about work, slavery, wage slavery and how they delete a person’s interiority until they are reduced entirely to their circumstances. Life as an outline, with the minimum amount of living required.
And yet for how disturbing and hopeless its ending is Under the Skin is a hopeful film. The alien’s attempt to free itself is futile but it does it anyway. It attempts an escape, which is more than most of us manage.
I’m aware Under the Skin is adapted from the book of the same name by Michel Faber but I’m only looking here at the film, which removes most of the book’s exposition.