Under The Skin (2013) has been met with such
a wide range of opinions, from disgust to amazement, that it is almost
impossible not become intrigue by what you will see once you take your seat. Under The Skin, for me, is simply one
of, if not the, best film made by a British director.
Under The Skin maintains a sense of transparency
and opaqueness, letting you get close, inviting the cliché that it gets ‘under
the skin of the audience’, while also refusing to be easily defined. Glazer
clearly understands cinematic language, and knows how to play with it. Glazer’s
previous film, Birth (2004), is full
of audience manipulation, making you believe the impossible, letting it and
wanting it to convince you, before revealing the mundane fact that it is exactly
what it seems like. However Under The
Skin sees Glazer creating new ways of using film, creating new ways to use
language, which goes some way to explaining how some have been so incredibly
repulsed by the film.
Visually Glazer is willing to experiment more
than most, layering images upon each other for symbolism. At one stage,
Johansson is shown beneath a collection of images with a yellowy hue. As images
flash by, melt into each other, drift out of the screen, we are seeing how
Johansson sees the world, a confusing mix of flashes. Never has Earth seemed so
alien. We can barely understand what we are being shown, and nor can Johansson.
We later get a more defined image layered image, Johansson sleeping in an ocean
of trees. It provides a strange, startling image as Johansson slowly melts into
the image of the forest. Glazer could have left us with the image of her asleep
in the cabin, however Glazer chooses something far more alien, something that
not only shows her asleep, but connotes a whole host of simultaneous meanings.
Does it mean she is starting to understand and become part of Earth as the
image literally shows us? Or is it saying the opposite, that the fact she is
looks so strange that she could never be part of this world? We have seen how
she has struggled to assimilate with humans, and her strangely floating in the
forest seems to symbolise something similar. I would go with the latter, but
there is an interesting case for both, especially in light of the ending.
During
the first half of the film, some of the most creative set-pieces involve men
Johansson has picked up being drawn into the black ectoplasm. Watching the men
sink into it, only for Johansson to walk back over it moments after are
powerful images, but the moments prior to these events are perhaps just as interesting.
A lot of the first half of the film involves people watching from her white
van. Her inviting men into her van, men who had no idea they were even being
filmed. Glazer has purposefully flipped the infamous ‘male gaze’ here. The men
are completely objectified by Johansson, they have one purpose only for her,
and she will spend hours just watching, hunting around, to find the right man. Johansson
becomes an incredibly powerful creature, partly sexually, partly for her otherworldliness.
When the men are instead ‘gazing’ at her (one man with a fully erect penis),
they literally walk straight into their death without even noticing. There is
no struggle, no fight, just the inevitable sinking into blackness. Their gaze
is made impotent, so hollow that they eventually become just skin floating
around in the ectoplasm. This intentional change of gaze again may explain why
many critics have perhaps felt uncomfortable watching Under The Skin, with male critics suddenly finding themselves the
objectified, rather than the one objectifying. It is, after all, more fun
watching, than being watched.
A
slightly more traditional, but just as creative sequence is during the ‘creation
process’ during the opening. The opening is comparable to scenes in The Tree of Life (2011) creation sequence, or the Star Child in
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). We are
shown confusing images of things we can only assume are parts of DNA or blood
cells floating and merging, creating Johansson into the alien being that she
is. Images quickly shift from CGI images into an extreme close-up of an
eyeball, the process of creation being completed at that moment. As well as
these images, we hear her practicing sounds, words, in order to complete her
transformation. We are left to piece together the meanings of these images and
sounds, as it is not clearly explained at all, with only the harsh-cut to the
eyeball giving any form of explanation. Glazer is brave enough to throw the
audience into the deep-end straight away, throwing in questions a load of existentialist
questions from the first moment about what it means to be human. Throwing these
questions straight at the audience right at the start is bound to put people
off, but it sets up an incredibly deep and unique film, full of images and
sounds that will haunt of days.