Under the Skin (2013)
Jonathan Glazer is not a director who makes things easy for himself, or for his audience. After a decade-long career directing music videos and commercials (most famously for Radiohead and Massive Attack), he moved into features with Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004), two films that marked him as someone more interested in atmosphere and unease than in conventional storytelling. Under the Skin, released in 2013, arrived nearly a decade after Birth and confirmed that his patience for orthodox narrative structure had not grown in the interim. The film is adapted, loosely and liberally, from Michel Faber's 2000 novel of the same name, though "adapted" might be too generous a word for what is, in practice, a fairly radical reimagining. Faber's novel is a mordant, darkly comic piece of science fiction set in the Scottish Highlands; Glazer and co-writer Walter Campbell stripped most of the original's explanatory tissue away and relocated proceedings to the streets of Glasgow, shooting partly with hidden cameras and casting real members of the Glaswegian public alongside professionals. The budget was modest and the production, backed by Film4, the BFI, and several independent production partners, took the best part of a decade to reach completion. Mica Levi's score, angular and genuinely unsettling, became one of the more discussed soundtracks of that year.
Scarlett Johansson had, by 2013, established herself firmly within big-studio franchise filmmaking (her run as Black Widow in the Marvel universe was already well underway, as anyone who has read our review of Captain America: Civil War will know). Under the Skin sat at the opposite end of the spectrum from all of that, and it remains the most genuinely unusual thing she has put her name to. Her casting was itself a considered choice: Glazer wanted the quality of recognisable, even iconic, femininity alongside something unknowable behind the eyes, and Johansson provides both. The supporting cast is a mix of professional actors and, in several key scenes, unsuspecting non-actors who had no idea they were being filmed, lending the Glasgow sequences a texture that studio productions simply cannot manufacture. Jeremy McWilliams, Lynsey Taylor Mackay, and Dougie McConnell fill out the more conventionally filmed roles, but the film's stranger, more documentary-like passages give it a quality closer to certain works of experimental European cinema than to anything you might find on a multiplex programme. For those drawn to horror and science fiction that operates by implication rather than exposition, it sits in interesting company alongside films like It Follows, another genre picture from roughly the same period that trusted its audience to sit with ambiguity rather than demanding clean resolution.
It is the kind of film that critics tend to place reverently on year-end lists while a fair portion of ordinary ticket-buyers leave the cinema quietly baffled, and that gap between reputation and experience is worth bearing in mind before you commit to it. Glazer's subsequent work, particularly The Zone of Interest (2023), would push a similar aesthetic rigour to even more extreme ends, but Under the Skin is where you can hear the logic of that approach being worked out in real time. Whether the result is a triumph of formal cinema or a polished but frustrating exercise in withholding depends enormously on your tolerance for films that refuse to meet you halfway.
I try to go into films relatively blind, but Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 picture Under the Skin is a thoroughly odd beast that caught me completely off guard. Despite knowing there was some "alien" business at play, I was wholly unprepared for just how aggressively avant-garde this actually is. There is barely any exposition to speak of. You are simply dropped into a bleak, rain-swept Scottish reality and expected to piece the narrative together as you go, which is a bold, if occasionally frustrating, gamble.
The core conceit, as I managed to piece it together, revolves around an alien entity (played by Scarlett Johansson) cruising the streets in a transit van, luring unsuspecting men into a terrifying, inky black void to be consumed. The menacing biker dudes tailing her operate much like worker ants, enforcing the hive's grim, unspoken agenda. It is a fascinating, deeply unsettling premise, but the film’s absolute refusal to hold your hand means you spend a good chunk of the runtime just trying to figure out the rules of this bizarre ecosystem.
The acting holds the whole precarious structure together. Johansson is more than fine in the lead role; she brings a chilling, detached curiosity to the character that perfectly suits the material. Fair play to the entire cast, including the unsuspecting non-actors she interacts with, who lend a startling, documentary-like realism to the proceedings. The performances are genuinely strong, which is lucky, because they have to carry the weight of a script that relies almost entirely on mood, implication, and eerie sound design rather than traditional dialogue.
This is a film that demands a very specific type of patience. It is undeniably striking and visually arresting, but its deliberate ambiguity left me feeling a bit adrift by the time the credits rolled. I can appreciate the sheer audacity of Glazer’s vision, even if the final product feels a bit like a beautifully shot, profoundly confusing puzzle. It is a thoroughly odd, memorable piece of cinema that will undoubtedly divide audiences down the middle.
Glazer has always occupied a particular corner of British cinema, one that values mood and image over accessibility, and Under the Skin is perhaps his purest expression of that instinct. It is the sort of film that rewards a second viewing more than most, partly because knowing the shape of the thing allows you to stop scrambling for footing and simply look at what is in front of you. Whether that constitutes a recommendation rather depends on how you feel about doing homework before you enjoy yourself. For a point of comparison in terms of formally ambitious, festival-circuit British filmmaking from the same era, Paolo Sorrentino's Youth makes for an interesting companion piece, another film that prioritises texture and image over conventional dramatic momentum. Under the Skin will not be for everyone, and there is no particular shame in finding it more admirable than enjoyable. Some films are easier to respect from a distance than to actually spend 108 minutes inside.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2013 | Watched: 2026-08-01
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Under the Skin (2013) on YouTube
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