Under the Skin (2013)
There's a version of watching Under the Skin where the whole thing just washes over you, strange and cold and beautiful, and you walk out feeling vaguely disturbed in a way you can't quite put into words. There's another version where you spend half the runtime squinting at the screen going, "right, but what is actually happening here?" Somehow, Jonathan Glazer's film managed to give me both experiences simultaneously, and I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about that.
I make a habit of going in relatively blind, and that served me well here, up to a point. I knew there was something alien going on. That much had filtered through. What I wasn't prepared for was just how aggressively avant-garde this thing actually is. There's almost no exposition. No helpful voiceover, no scene-setting title card, no friendly character who exists purely to ask the right questions. You're dropped into a bleak, rain-swept Scottish landscape and left to piece the logic together yourself, like assembling flat-pack furniture with no instructions and several pieces missing.
What I managed to work out, gradually, is that Scarlett Johansson is playing some kind of alien entity cruising the streets of Glasgow in a transit van, picking up men and luring them into a terrifying, inky black void where they're consumed. There are menacing biker figures shadowing her throughout, operating like worker ants enforcing a grim, unspoken directive. It's a genuinely unsettling premise, and the film wears it with an almost contemptuous cool, never once condescending to explain itself.
Johansson is more than fine, she's quietly extraordinary. The detached, watchful curiosity she brings to the role is perfectly calibrated. You're never quite sure how much this entity understands about the humans she's harvesting, and Johansson plays that ambiguity with real precision. What makes the whole thing stranger and more effective is that many of the men she interacts with were apparently real members of the public, unaware they were being filmed. That lends certain scenes a startling, almost documentary quality that no amount of careful casting could manufacture. It's genuinely unsettling in a way that sticks with you, and it reminded me a little of how It Follows manages to get under your skin through atmosphere and dread rather than conventional horror mechanics. Both films trust the audience to feel the threat before they fully understand it.
The sound design deserves a mention too, because it's doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting throughout. The score is genuinely oppressive in the best possible way, scraping and droning beneath scenes that might otherwise feel too sparse to sustain tension. Glazer uses it as a kind of emotional cue in the absence of dialogue, and for the most part it works. This is filmmaking that's deeply committed to mood over mechanics.
But here's my honest problem with it. Deliberate ambiguity is a legitimate artistic choice, and I respect it. What I'm less patient with is when that ambiguity shades into opacity that doesn't feel entirely earned. By the time the final act arrives, I found myself a bit adrift, grasping for something to hold onto and coming up empty. There's a difference between a film that trusts you to fill in the gaps and a film that simply neglects to give you enough to work with. Under the Skin occasionally tips into the latter, and the result is that a film with genuine power ends up feeling like a beautifully shot puzzle where a few crucial pieces have been deliberately withheld.
That said, I can't dismiss it. It's too striking, too committed, too genuinely strange to write off. The images stay with you. The void sequences in particular are unlike anything I've seen, viscerally wrong in a way that proper horror rarely manages. Glazer has made something that demands a very particular kind of patience, and if you're in the right frame of mind for it, it'll reward you. I just wasn't quite in that frame of mind throughout, which probably says as much about me on the night as it does about the film.
Three stars. Odd, memorable, and maddening in almost equal measure.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2013 | Watched: 2026-08-01
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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