Under the Skin

Under the Skin both made me feel numb, as I barely made it, barely touched my conscious surface, as at the same time, it made for an interesting experience. It is not a common film, and it seems, especially in the first half, or probably throughout the majority of the film, that nothing really happens. A woman takes an odd alien transformation, and then travels around Glasgow streets meeting random men and taking them out…of space. Why go over that number of subjects, as in humans, when we already know the outcome, we already know what’s happening? Or maybe we don’t really know what happens, we only know what the woman will do. The thing is, that’s probably the point, and the point has to be to show this number of different ordinary people that come towards this young woman, for a number of indifferent reasons. And how this pleasantly and warm and good looking woman can be someone and something completely harmful, just utterly unpredictable and capable of anything. Human or non human, the truth is such outcome rings real for us in here on earth on every given situation. It is an unusual experience and sometimes hard to go through, like the scene where you have a young couple with a baby on a beach, where we can see the man gradually drowning, the woman being taken by these unknown people and the baby staying alone in this cold windy beach crying his lungs out. It challenges you.

The film is consistently composed, to the detail and it’s beautiful. And I would think it is not necessarily bad to stare at Scarlett Johansson and pretty and often blank canvas for what it seems to be infinite hours…until you come to the conclusion that basically life is fucked up for humans as it is, imagine for aliens…

It is surely a unique piece of filmmaking and storytelling, but this film is definitely a solo show for Johansson.