Jonathan Glazer
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Under the Skin (2014)
Themes Visuals
It might be a bit hyperbolic to consider it an apt companion piece to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it surely touches upon a similar investigative theme, only in reverse.
This big bang ends with an extreme close-up of an eyeball filling the screen, recalling not only Keir Dullea’s orb (and his terrifying intergalactic travel) during the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey but also Catherine Deneuve’s at the start of Repulsion, another film in which lascivious men meet bad ends.
She's an alien, born or transformed in an introductory scene recalling images from "2001: A Space Odyssey."
There are echoes of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey in this and in the observational alien tale The Man Who Fell To Earth.
It's easy to see why people have been insistently calling director Jonathan Glazer, making his third feature and his first since the exquisitely disturbed Birth a decade ago, a new Kubrick, though it is also lazy: the opening gambit of Under the Skin is like a pastiche of the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey , using the same series of stacked half-circles which in that film actually depicts a syzygy and in this film merely suggests one, though it turns out to indicate an act of conception.
Those feelings notwithstanding, it still seems within reason to note that the opening sequences of Under the Skin reminded me potently of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
influenced Under the Skin (2014)
Themes Characters Visuals
I’ve seen it compared to Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) — a film I love.
The casting of Johansson, too, proves additionally inspired; just as with David Bowie’s Thomas Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth, the very nature of their iconic presence further distances the notion of mere actors-cum-aliens—they’re already elevated above the clouds in their stratospheric fame.
Wearing a fedora pulled down low—not unlike the one David Bowie sports at the end of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, another touchstone for Glazer’s film—and clutching the hand of Ryan Reynolds, her boyfriend at the time, Johansson barely camouflaged herself, taking the risk that she would not be swarmed.
There are echoes of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey in this and in the observational alien tale The Man Who Fell To Earth.
Nic Roeg used David Bowie similarly in The Man Who Fell to Earth, but the juxtaposition with ordinary Glaswegian shoppers makes Scarlett – stonewashed jeans and fake fur only marginally dimming her glamour – seem even further adrift than the Thin White Duke.
A direct descendant of Nicolas Roeg’s classic “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” “Under the Skin” is the kind of movie people will be talking about, and dissecting and puzzling over, for years.
Performance. (1970)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
influenced Sexy Beast (2001), Under the Skin (2014)
Visuals Themes
Not for nothing does Scarlett Johansson, a siren in the natural order, look like Mick Jagger in Performance, or maybe, at an angle, James Fox. It’s not that Jonathan Glazer’s masculinised her per se, but he has succeeded in turning one of the world’s most desirable women into the awkward, slightly built alien of Michel Faber’s source novel.
The casting of James Fox in a supporting role and the sporadic fracturing of continuity – in the middle of a fateful confrontation, the movie simply leaps ahead in time, filling in the gaps later with teasing flashback snippets – evokes memories of Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance.
That opening scene serves as a dark and funny omen for what follows in this stylish thriller that evokes numerous British crime dramas like "Performance" and "The Long Good Friday."
Other pleasures include a chilling performance by Ian McShane, and the welcome reappearance of James Fox in a criminal setting, an echo of "Performance", more than 30 years ago.
Highlighting the banality of evil has become a trend in recent Holocaust dramas like The Zone of Interest. But unlike that film, Nuremberg relies on didactic expository dialogue.
…just as 2023’s The Zone of Interest depicted, Nuremberg captures how the Holocaust was not carried out by some supernatural evil but by everyday people so entrenched in their beliefs, ambition, and power that they committed horrific acts against their fellow human beings.
…while as an exploration of Nazi evils the film pales in comparison to Jonathan Glazer's masterwork The Zone of Interest (2023).
It’s unfair to make the comparison to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Still, Glazer’s film was willing to sit uncomfortably with evil long enough to dissect it without turning its characters into a sideshow of Hollywood tropes. The problem is that it’s not as accessible as Vanderbilt’s film. They share the intent of dissecting evil, but Glazer is much clearer about how he wants to approach it, while Vanderbilt strings together a few conceptually interesting ideas before sacrificing them all for a more generic absolute.
While the plot may not deliver the same emotional gut-punch as The Zone of Interest, it also explores the banality of evil, suggesting that horrific acts are committed not by some supernatural force, but by ‘ordinary people’ motivated by ambition and unchecked desire for power.
With its dissonant soundtrack, it's an expressionistic opening reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman 's "Persona," only minus the emotion, the meaning and the interest.
Why, then, does Under the Skin remind me of Persona as much as anything?
It's this emphasis on keeping the Holocaust unsaid and unseen yet always heard is what makes The Zone of Interest an undeniably powerful yet unique cinematic experience that lines it in the tradition of films like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012) – a coughing fit evokes Anwar Congo from the latter.
This is the same line of reasoning that leads to the (extremely stylistically different) 1985 documentary Shoah, for one, and I will say that I don't know that I agree.
Claude Lanzmann, in his monumental Shoah, gave us the bureaucratic answer: defining at length the logistics of how it happened. British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer now offers up a physiological response: the mental compartmentalization needed to completely sidestep and ignore a soul-shattering nightmare happening in your vicinity.
Then Fiennes arrives and blows the film apart at the seams with an astonishingly fierce turn reminiscent of Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast.
Awaiting the call from deranged gang boss Harry (Fiennes, channelling Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast), Ken is keen to explore ‘the Venice of the North’ while Ray would rather just drink, sulk and swear.
Fiennes, though not as scary as Ben Kingsley was in “Sexy Beast,” is especially arresting and funny as the kind of crime lord who has three kids and a string of Christmas cards hung over the fireplace just so.
When Ralph Fiennes appears as Harry, it’s as though he’s swallowed the soul of Ben Kingsley’s Don Logan from Sexy Beast and added a dash more psychotic fury.
McDonagh's idea of profound profanity consists of Ray being very amused by midgets, fat Americans, and effete Canadians and Ken being sucked in by the medieval, touristy charms of sleepy Bruges; both await some word from their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes), himself busy doing a real convincing impersonation of Ben Kingsley's insane mobster from Sexy Beast.
The star appears to be set on one-upping Ben Kingsley in "Sexy Beast," which is fine since "In Bruges" is starting to flag by this point, and Fiennes's energy gets the film over the finish line.
By the end of the film, which visually references a scene in Jonathan Glazer‘s Birth , he only realized then how much he was in love with it.
It's a proper coup de theatre, literally, and may have taken away the crown for Best Performance Showing in One Shot a Woman Experiencing Cathartic Feelings as She Listens to Classical Music that's been held by Nicole Kidman since 2004 for her work in Jonathan Glazer's Birth .
Commercially, of course, it’s prudent to venture into avant garde science fiction territory on a smallish budget, the way Jonathan Glazer did with his truly disorienting and memorable 2013 alien visitation film “Under the Skin.”
In eerie moments, the film’s dreamy dark vibe reminded me of Jonathan Glazer’s challenging and chilling Under the Skin.
The past five years have seen two superb films about the utter foreignness of alien life forms: the crowd-pleasing Arrival , in which Amy Adams’ linguist ultimately decodes the spatter-based language of “heptapods ,” and the chilly and ungiving Under the Skin , in which Scarlett Johansson’s slinky extraterrestrial preys upon young men, the whys and hows as unknown as her name.
However faithful this movie might or might not be, what can be said is that this is pure science fiction and is as thought-provoking, intellectually challenging and as spiritually fascinating as anything that’s hit theatres this side of 2014’s Under the Skin or 2012’s Cloud Atlas.
There are shades of smart, risk-taking recent sci-fi films like “Under the Skin” and “The Fountain” in “Annihilation’s” DNA, and even hints of “mother!” in its environmental messaging.
Visually, the abstract movie is stunning, with its beautiful and hallucinatory VFX landing somewhere in between the cosmic Rorschach blots of “The Tree Of Life,” the eerie profiles of “Under The Skin” and a unique paroxysm of H.R. Giger and phosphorescent atoms.
The Act of Killing (2012)
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer
influenced The Zone of Interest (2023)
Themes Visuals
It's this emphasis on keeping the Holocaust unsaid and unseen yet always heard is what makes The Zone of Interest an undeniably powerful yet unique cinematic experience that lines it in the tradition of films like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012) – a coughing fit evokes Anwar Congo from the latter.
Later, after a coughing fit that evokes memories of Anwar Congo in “The Act of Killing,” Glazer suddenly introduces an even more dramatic break from the film's established style — one that returns us to the dialectic between depicting an atrocity and tracing the chalk outline of one.
This big bang ends with an extreme close-up of an eyeball filling the screen, recalling not only Keir Dullea’s orb (and his terrifying intergalactic travel) during the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey but also Catherine Deneuve’s at the start of Repulsion, another film in which lascivious men meet bad ends.
The world as seen through alien eyes, it turns out, looks much like the world as seen through the eyes of a schizophrenic (“ Repulsion ”), a paranoiac (Lodge Kerrigan’s “Keane”) or a sociopath (Cristi Puiu’s “Aurora”) — which, if it’s Glazer’s point, is one he makes early and often, Johansson doing her best to convey varying degrees of blankness and incomprehension at her own actions and those of others.
As in the classic thrillers of Roman Polanski, such as Repulsion or Rosemary’s Baby, it’s implied that the mere fact of being a human being – and more particularly, a woman – is sufficient reason for paranoia.
Get Out is searing satire, with scary/comic riffs on slavery and assimilation, but it’s also a smashing crowd-pleaser of a horror film, complete with mad science, cult-like crazies, and a creep-out homage to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.
His economical style is paired with moments of surreal beauty, particularly in his poetic visualisation – perhaps in homage to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin – of a hypnosis session in which Missy kindly offers Chris some free therapy to cure his nasty smoking habit.
Peele takes some pointers from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin to build our sense of queasy apprehension.
He does indeed end up being hypnotized, put into a state that Missy refers to as “the sunken place,” and Peele visualizes it as a vast ocean of darkness, in a touch that recalls the dead-end abysses of Under the Skin while finding its own unique notes of helplessness.
It is not only the best horror film since “Under the Skin” (2013), but a subversive and often hilarious commentary on race as well.
In scenes reminiscent of the underrated 2013 Jonathan Glazer shocker “Under the Skin,” Missy hypnotizes Chris and sends him to an outer-space-like place beneath.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Horse Girl exists somewhere in the median between northbound indie quirk (Duplass joints Cyrus and The Skeleton Twins courted similar vibes) and southbound insanity (I caught whiffs of 2001 , Under the Skin and Twin Peaks in this, believe it or not).
In Under the Skin , a clear inspiration, the audience is made to feel unease at the world constructed around Scarlett Johansson’s man-eating alien.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Directed by Philip Kaufman
influenced Under the Skin (2014)
Visuals Themes
In stark contrast, such rough-and-ready sequences sit alongside extraordinarily elegant and evocative FX tableaux that combine the shock factor of Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake (bodies disintegrating from the inside) with the serenity of artist Richard Wilson's breathtaking installation 20:50 (vast pools of oil that appear solid, but threaten to engulf) as aroused men disappear into the cosmic void.
It’s strange and arbitrary the way science fiction was from the 1970s and early 1980s, whether the movies were flamboyantly idiosyncratic like Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth or commercial but unrelentingly eerie like Philip Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
That inspired bit of casting is almost enough to inscribe “Green Room” alongside “Sexy Beast” in the pantheon of against-type British thespian screen villainy.
Like his chrome-domed countryman Ben Kingsley in 2001’s Sexy Beast, Stewart is way scarier when he’s neither barking nor biting but just purring controlled threats.
Stewart's performance isn't the landmark it's being sold as; certainly not at Ben Kingsley's Sexy Beast degree of difficulty.
The opening of "Under the Skin" might remind you of the openings of "2001," " Blade Runner " or " Close Encounters of the Third Kind ," or certain movies by Paul Thomas Anderson : an immersive, hypnotic gambit that feels like the mental equivalent of a palate cleanser.
In her cheap wig, heavy lipstick and fur coat, Johansson’s prowling alien resembles a first cousin of Pris, the “basic pleasure model” of Ridley Scott’s visionary 1982 film “Blade Runner.”
Compare this to Blade Runner, and Blade Runner looks even more like a literary and cinematic masterpiece.
An eerie electronic score by Mica Levy of the avant-pop group Micachu and the Shapes is reminiscent of György Ligeti’s heady compositions for Kubrick’s 2001 , The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut .
Glazer disorients the viewer through his use of the Steadicam, exploiting its uncannily smooth movement to suggest, as Stanley Kubrick did in The Shining , the perspective of a superhuman voyeur.
Long stretches of Under The Skin resemble a hybrid of Stanley Kubrick films, shifting from the head-trip sensation of 2001 ’s stargate sequence to The Shining ’s ominous tracking shots to A Clockwork Orange ’s depictions of a crumbling United Kingdom fraught with peril.
From "Get Carter" and "The Long Good Friday" through "Croupier" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," U.K. filmmakers have shown a liking and facility for crime stories featuring hard guys tested by intolerable dilemmas.
That opening scene serves as a dark and funny omen for what follows in this stylish thriller that evokes numerous British crime dramas like "Performance" and "The Long Good Friday."
"Sexy Beast" falls somewhere between the best of the genre - "The Long Good Friday," for example, and the stylish hijinks of Guy Ritchie's "Snatch."
The purposeful violence of Brit mobsters at cross-purposes recalls Villain (which, not incidentally, also co-starred Ian McShane), The Long Good Friday and the original 1971 Get Carter.
Highlighting the banality of evil has become a trend in recent Holocaust dramas like The Zone of Interest. But unlike that film, Nuremberg relies on didactic expository dialogue.
…as an exploration of Nazi evils the film pales in comparison to Jonathan Glazer's masterwork The Zone of Interest (2023).
It’s unfair to make the comparison to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Still, Glazer’s film was willing to sit uncomfortably with evil long enough to dissect it without turning its characters into a sideshow of Hollywood tropes. The problem is that it’s not as accessible as Vanderbilt’s film. They share the intent of dissecting evil, but Glazer is much clearer about how he wants to approach it, while Vanderbilt strings together a few conceptually interesting ideas before sacrificing them all for a more generic absolute.
…just as 2023’s The Zone of Interest depicted, Nuremberg captures how the Holocaust was not carried out by some supernatural evil but by everyday people so entrenched in their beliefs, ambition, and power that they committed horrific acts against their fellow human beings.
Stranger Things (2016)
Directed by David Champion
influenced by Under the Skin (2014)
Themes Visuals
…of Stand by Me and Under the Skin…
Or the images of Eleven encountering beings from other worlds in an inky realm, which called to mind the great sci-fi film Under the Skin.
The creature’s world -- shifting between that of something from Under the Skin and the video game Silent Hill -- is never boring, and supplies plenty of scares.