Jonathan Glazer (2013)

It’s sometimes said about the Moors Murders that they wouldn’t have happened if Ian Brady had acted alone – that the children invited to accept a lift were blinded to danger by Myra Hindley, simply because she was female.  I was reminded of this watching Under the Skin.  The victims of the film’s protagonist are adult males.  The young woman who picks them up in the van she’s driving may be sexually provocative – she is played by Scarlett Johansson – but she surely can’t intend or be capable of physical harm to men.  (Those who pay for this wrong assumption with their lives in Under the Skin are actors but unscripted exchanges between Johansson and non-actors on the streets of Glasgow were an important element of its making.  A few of these conversations remain in the final cut.)  The seducer-abductor is in fact an alien in a young woman’s body.   I wish I’d been able to understand better what was going on although the lack of any clear motivation on the part of the Johansson character and the mysterious motorcyclists who are working with her made Under the Skin more immediately powerful:  I couldn’t get a handle on – couldn’t get away from – what was happening.   The explanation on Wikipedia and in some reviews that I’ve read is that the aliens are harvesting the organs of the men being killed by Johansson.  But I’m still not sure why.

Under the Skin, based on a 2000 novel by Michael Faber, is Jonathan Glazer’s first feature since Birth (2004).  (Glazer co-wrote the screenplay with Walter Campbell.)  It’s a piece of sustained visual imagination – and sonic intensity – and the combination of fantastic images and use of actual landscape and seascape is gripping.   Seeing ordinary Scottish life through alien eyes works well.  The film was mostly shot in Glasgow (and in various locations in the Highlands).  I had problems hearing some of what was said but the thick Scottish accents actually contribute to the strangeness of the world being experienced by the Johansson character, just one element of the barrage of optical and aural sensations that she has to assimilate.  For the first half-hour or so, Under the Skin is impressive but essentially episodic.  It becomes something else when Johansson picks up a man disfigured by neurofibromatosis (‘elephant man’ syndrome), all of whose growth appears to have gone into his swollen head.  The man is anxious to hide his face and incredulous when Johansson invites physical contact.  This brings an emotional weight to the film and gives another dimension to the ‘under the skin’ theme – although I found it problematic.  As I watched these sequences I was hoping that the man was in prosthetic make-up, then hoping against hope.   The character is played by Adam Pearson, who suffers from ‘NF1’ and has appeared on television documentaries etc about facial disfigurement and the prejudice surrounding it.  I couldn’t help recoiling from Pearson’s appearance but I find his casting troubling, even so.  Glazer could argue, and rightly, that it forces the viewer to confront their feelings about physical deformity.  I feel guilty that, in a film that contains many consciously horrifying images, it’s Adam Pearson’s face and body that, two weeks after seeing Under the Skin, have stayed in my mind.  This is my problem, of course, yet I still think Glazer is exploiting the appearance of Pearson, who will never appear in a movie as anything other than a disfigured man.

This encounter has an effect on the Scarlett Johansson character:  it seems to make her both more conscious of her physical covering and depressed – although I didn’t get how, on a realistic level, she at this point loses her van and the fur coat which is part of her allure and her disguise in the first half of the story.  The experience with the man played by Adam Pearson leads into a part of the film which has dramatically more familiar texture.  A new man picks her up and takes her to his home (until now the men have gone back to her place).  This piece of the story is no less absorbing than the rest of Under the Skin but, because the real world in which the man lives seems to dominate, you begin to question things about Johansson that you didn’t when the alien perspective prevailed.  (For the most part, you accept what she does as thanks to the capacity of a different order of intelligence.)  In an earlier sequence, she tried to eat a piece of chocolate gateau and threw up – it’s not clear, when the man makes her a meal, if she tries to eat any of the food.  (The pair have plates of food on their laps as they watch television:  I did like Johansson’s experiencing an old Tommy Cooper routine as something from another planet.)  The growing trust between them culminates in their trying to make love but she can’t do it and leaves, to wander out into a forest and an encounter with a forest ranger.  He, in trying to rape her, tears her skin and exposes what lies beneath.  He douses her with petrol and sets fire to her.   The remarkable opening sequence of the film, culminating in a staring eye, suggests a kind of pre-natal experience.  The conclusion is cremation, with ashes floating in the air.  Although his protagonist is an alien, Jonathan Glazer manages to convey the sense of how a human existence begins and ends.

Scarlett Johansson is very convincing as she switches between the face that her character needs to present to the world on screen and expressing to the audience non-human observation and puzzlement.  It’s effective that, even in control, she seems vulnerable and that, even naked, she has a robustness and an authority.   The forest ranger is slightly overdone – he’s too creepy from the start.  Otherwise, the highly naturalistic playing of the various men – Joe Szula and Paul Brannigan as Johansson’s first two victims, Michael Moreland as the man who takes her home – is excellent and blends seamlessly with the non-professionals on screen.  The impressive score is by Mica Levi and the cinematography by Daniel Landin.  The editor was Paul Watts.

20 March 2014