Under the Skin (2014)
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
A seductive stranger prowls the streets of Glasgow in search of prey: unsuspecting men who fall under her spell.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
Composed primarily of shapes and lights, the scene might be an art-house version of the whirlpool-like "Hypno-Vista" gimmick that opens "Horrors of the Black Museum" (1959), or the "Hypnomagic" process of " The Hypnotic Eye " (1960).
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But as with John Carpenter’s classic sci-fi “visitor” film, “Starman,” and others like it, she gets curious, perhaps based on remorse.
In Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth and John Carpenter's Starman an extraterrestrial character went under cover and moved in our midst; they had to figure out how to adapt to human relationships and societal standards.
It calls to mind Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas’ THX 1138, but those meticulously crafted visuals contrast sharply with the guerrilla immediacy of the pick-up sequences.