Under The Skin (aka The Other From Another Planet)

Here's a thought experiment - I propose that you could swap out the titles of Jonathan Glazer's 2000 film Sexy Beast and his 2013 film Under The Skin and they would, in a way, make every bit as much sense. "Sexy Beast", the subject its own insoluble mystery in terms of where it fits in with the tale of Ray Winstone's retired London gangster, ceases to be a puzzle at all when applied to the odyssey of Scarlett Johansson's seductive night stalker. "Under The Skin", meanwhile, seems a pertinent allusion to the bestial realities forever throbbing below the interplay of Don and his desperately reluctant hosts - the violent past that Gal aspires to transcend but will likely always have a hold on him, which he defiantly attempts to bury deep beneath the surface of the earth. While we're at it, the title of Glazer's 2004 film Birth seems just as interchangeable with Under The Skin. The former picture has Nicole Kidman questioning if the soul of her deceased lover has re-entered the world and concealed itself inside the form of a 10-year-old child. The latter opens with a sequence that evokes a birth (light intersecting with darkness and morphing into something resembling an eyeball) and a human form coming into being. Like Birth, it could be a reincarnation story; at the beginning, the body of a young woman (Lynsey Taylor Mackay), who might be the protagonist's doppelganger, is retrieved from a roadside and stripped of her clothing by Johansson, who puts them on and seemingly sets out to walk the Earth in her stead. Throughout the film, she undergoes an internal transformation, one that suggests she is being born all over again, as she comes to experience the world through new eyes.

This is to say that Glazer's (sparse, but uniformly strong) filmography, while encompassing an array of tones and genres, touch on similar themes - horrors that are unspeakable, the troublesome duality of human nature, an awareness of mortality as omnipresent as it is grotesque. Outwardly, Sexy Beast and Under The Skin couldn't be more different creatures. Sexy Beast is a wordier, more character-driven piece, punctuated by intermittent outbursts of violence and a hyperealism that seems reminiscent of Looney Tunes cartoons. Under The Skin has comparatively little use for dialogue, at least dialogue that can be readily understood. Numerous scenes are reliant on stretches of eerie silence, and on Mica Levi's piercing string score. Conversations are frequently muted, and in some sequences all speech is reduced to an incomprehensible babble. The characters therein are more vague silhouettes than individuals we particularly get to know, and most of them are not given names. Sexy Beast plays out mostly in the scorching Mediterranean heat, while Under The Skin unfolds amidst a chilly Scottish haze. Sexy Beast is intense and aggressive whereas Under The Skin is icy and cerebral. Yet there is more overlap between the respective arcs of Gal and Johansson's unnamed protagonist than perhaps meets the eye. Both are ex-patriots looking to abandon pasts that are dark and undefined in favour of a more secluded existence (Gal has settled on this path before his story has begun, while Johansson chooses it throughout the course of hers). Both are pursued by sinister figures who seem intent on reminding them that there can be no escape from the deadly forces with which they have already aligned. Gal is menaced by Don in the real world and by a monstrous rabbit in his dream visions, while Johansson is relentlessly followed by a mysterious motorcyclist (Jeremy McWilliams), who initially appears to assist in her activities but becomes more threatening as she grows more elusive. Early into Under The Skin, Glazer continues a gag implemented at the end of Sexy Beast, when Gal is abandoned at a bus stop in the company of an ad for a Bosch phone, commanding consumers to "Show Your True Colour", a playful allusion to the character's incongruous qualities. In a similar fashion, we see Johansson cruising the streets of Glasgow in her white van, passing several signs that clue us in to her true nature - among them, a poster promoting the video game Space Invaders and another advertising a stage production of Beauty & The Beast (roles that she jointly fulfils). An ad for a grammar school on the rear of a bus, meanwhile, tauntingly assures us that "It's possible".

Glazer's great achievement with Under The Skin is in creating a film that scrutinises humanity through the eyes of something that feels distinctly inhuman - in this case, a carnivorous extra-terrestrial who poses as a human female in order to lure unsuspecting men in the outskirts of Glasgow to their doom. Adapted from Michael Faber's 2000 novel of the same name, the screenplay, a collaboration between Glazer and Walter Campbell, uses few of the plot specificities of Faber's novel, stripping it down to its core element of an otherworldly female with a sinister agenda interacting with a world that is unknowable to her, but speaks increasingly to her sense of curiosity. Johansson is perfectly cast as the tantalising space vixen, exuding a beguilement but also a delicateness that is not quite of this Earth. Faber gave the protagonist a name - Isserley - which is never spoken in the dialogue of Glazer's film. His novel also went into greater detail about the nature of the alien race, and the gruesome fates awaiting the humans they harvested, the sole purpose of their covert Earth operations of course being To Serve Man. In Glazer's film, this much is merely hinted - the protagonist ensnares her prey by leading them into a black void and enticing them to remove their clothing, before leaving them suspended in an ominous pool, to be deflated like a balloon, leaving only their skin (is this a symbolic sequence? Or has she literally opened a portal to another dimension?). A queasy but revealing sequence momentarily transforms the process into something more familiar - a stream of bloody innards are seen moving along on what looks like a conveyor belt - and then back into something unfamiliar, as a beam of red light apparently engulfs them. Glazer's film regards the alien world as something that it is predominantly beyond our comprehension, but just comprehensible enough to enable another, macabre interpretation of the film's title, in that it is literally what is under our skin that these extra terrestrials find so appealing about us. It becomes a memento mori, a reminder that beneath it all we are just collections of flesh, bones and viscera - in this foreign species' eyes, little more than bags of offal waiting to be extracted, processed and consumed in some far-off planet's equivalent to a Happy Meal.

The implications are terrifying, yet this extra terrestrial perspective is a fascinating one to experience, for what skilfully unfamiliar work it makes of the familiar. The Glaswegian roadsides by night, stretches of tarmac beneath glaringly bright street lamps, are the kind of perfectly mundane location we'll have seen a thousand times over, but here become frightening, hypnotic and alien, a light show as beautifully realised and as awe-inspiring as any of the spectacles in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of The Third Kind (1977). The world we see in Under The Skin seems alive and intimate but also distant, cold and as impenetrable to its protagonist as any of those alien horrors would be to its denizens. The protagonist's pick-up ritual is as eerily detached; from inside her vehicle, she peruses the streets for prospective prey. Notably, she has just exited a shopping mall, turning her hunt into a dark reflection of the Earthlings' own consumerist rapacity. She ignores the women and carefully assesses each of the men, working according to a meticulous selection process whereby the men chosen are all young, walking alone and, as her chat-up ritual seems designed to establish, unattached. Despite the open reference to Beauty & The Beast, the fairy tale being evoked here is more a gender-reversed version of Little Red Riding Hood, in which a she-wolf seduces and effectively consumes the naive young men who can be tempted to wander astray. She purchases and dons a fur coat (another skin that has been gruesomely detached from its original owner), a jarring choice of attire that openly flaunts her beastly nature.

The allure of the protagonist, and her dark deadly portal, are not the only forces in the world that threaten to engulf its inhabitants, nor is carnal desire the single impulse that can prompt an individual to walk willingly to their destruction. Emotional attachment is shown to be its own slippery slope, prompting those affected to act in ways that are contrary to their self-preservation. The film's most disturbing sequence has little to do with the protagonist's hunting ritual, with which there is only incidental intersection. The protagonist is on a beach, talking to a potential new target in the form of a Czech swimmer (Kryštof Hádek), when her seduction is interrupted by a crisis from further along the shore. A family's dog has been caught up in the tide; the wife (Alison Chand) has entered the waves in an attempt to save it, but become caught up herself. The husband (Roy Armstrong) then follows to try and save her, but certainly awaits a similar fate. Meanwhile, the couple's baby is left unattended on the beach. The swimmer intervenes and manages to get a hold of the husband and drag him back to shore, but his heroic gesture is rejected; the husband immediately charges back into the waves, presumably to his doom. His devotion to his wife is such that he would sooner join her in her watery grave than abandon her - which might be more laudable if it didn't completely override his devotion to his infant child, who is left abandoned. The protagonist takes advantage of the swimmer's exhausted state to make a shortcut with her abduction process - she walks over, knocks him out with a stone and drags his body away, all while ignoring the distressed howls of the baby. The point of this sequence, so shocking and so gratuitous to so many viewers, is commonly thought to be to demonstrate the aliens' lack of humanity, a crying baby being the one thing that is practically guaranteed to arouse our human sympathies. When the motorcyclist later arrives on the scene to remove all traces that the swimmer was there, he too takes no interest in the baby, who is still there and still howling as the dusk sets in. Its prospects now seem harrowingly grim - either it will be claimed by the waves itself or it will freeze to death during the night. But there is another, more subtle purpose to this interlude that reveals itself slightly later in the film, when the protagonist listens to a radio broadcast reporting on what we presume to be the same tragic occurrence. The body of the husband has since been washed up on the shore and identified as a chemistry lecturer from Edinburgh University, while police continue to search for his wife and son. We might be so preoccupied with the open (although obviously inauspicious) fate of the abandoned infant that we might not immediately pick up on one individual's absence from this news report - yes, the dog, but there is also no mention of the swimmer, who would have disappeared at the same time, and whom we might have expected to be included in the police search. But then no one knew that he was there (any more than they knew about the presence of the protagonist), and the motorcyclist has acted to make sure it remains that way. Notably, this is the only instance in the narrative in which we hear any kind of commentary on a death we've witnessed after the fact. There are no news bulletins on any of the missing young men the protagonist has abducted, the implication being that their absence has not been noticed, or at least not deemed worthy of making the news. A distinction is drawn between the everyday chaos of the universe and the meticulously clean efforts of the aliens, who go about their business in a way that ensures they will not be detected. The motorcyclist ignores the crying baby because its plight has nothing to do with the protagonist's actions, and it is not on the aliens' agenda to intervene with Earthly matters that extend beyond their own practices - this is just universe being its typically indifferent self.

I wonder if Glazer included this horrifying sequence, which has effectively no consequence in terms of how the protagonist's story progresses (the news report is the last we hear of it), as a deliberate means of testing the viewers' sensibilities and illuminating our own empathic blind spots. We don't like to see babies, dogs and idyllic families become the victims of terrible tragedies. But perhaps we feel a certain indifference to the kinds of victims the protagonist seeks out - those who lack familial ties and (compared to the university lecturer) are not distinguished enough to inspire much concern. We might be disturbed by the squeamish fates awaiting her abductees, but do we necessarily feel the same sympathy for them as we do the drowning family? Are these character types that we are happy to treat as dispensable? In the grander scheme of things, there perhaps is little difference. The film moves on quickly from the family's tragedy, and we suspect the news cycle will also - the radio broadcast has already switched to a more cheerful discussion before we've cut to another scene.

Before his untimely, undetected demise, the swimmer imparts enough autobiographical information to establish himself as a prospective soulmate to the protagonist, and to Gal of Sexy Beast - he's another ex-patriot who, in his own words, is looking "to get away from it all". He does not specify what he is looking to get away from in the Czech Republic, but states that he has settled in this Scottish locale because "It's nowhere". His remoteness and anonymity, the very things that mark him out as viable prey to the protagonist, are to him defence mechanisms. Notably, he is the first character who says anything of genuine resonance to the protagonist, in letting her in on the possibility of escape. This possibility becomes increasingly relevant, as the more time she spends with the Earthlings, the more her perspective is seen to evolve and draw her away from her given directive. She begins to notice women and observe them from her typically chilly distance, but in a way that feels curious rather than predatory. Later, whilst walking, she trips and lands face-first on the pavement, and a group of passers-by help her to her feet. A dramatic change occurs; the world momentarily blurs out of focus, and suddenly she is seeing the denizens of downtown Glasgow up close, male and female alike, going about their nondescript business. She is seeing people, not prey, and from an intimate enough proximity to suggest that she feels like a participant in their world, not an interloping observer. Was it the kindness of strangers that triggered the change, or the impact of the fall? The most game-changing incident involves an encounter with a man with facial deformities (Adam Pearson), whom the protagonist talks into accepting a ride in her van and subjects to her usual seduction routine. We've seen this ritual enough times by now to know what kind of danger the man is in, but on this occasion the process seems particularly cruel. He admits that he has no friends, has never had a partner and shops at night because the daytime crowds would not accept him; she tells him he has beautiful hands. The cruelty is double-edged - are we more troubled by the alien's willingness to take advantage of this man's isolation, with kindness that is presumably feigned, or by the callousness of his fellow human in making him an outcast for his physical appearance? The man's lack of social connections make him an ideal candidate for the protagonist's deadly harvest, and yet this time she can not see it through to its conclusion. She lures him into her portal and entices him to undress, but ultimately leaves him alive (albeit to be picked off by the motorcyclist the following morning).

With that, the nature of the narrative drastically alters. The protagonist leaves the city and flees into the Highlands, abandoning her van and shedding her skin in the form of the fur coat. Her days of luring and ensnaring human victims now behind her, her new aspiration is, like the swimmer before her, to get away from it all and find some refuge in the world beyond. She is pursued by the motorcyclist - frighteningly, there is revealed to be more than one of them at work - yet they never quite get close enough to burgeon into an immediate threat, rather a distant but relentless one. For now, the greater dangers to the protagonist come from the people themselves, and from her inability to blend in with them. Minus her beastly coat, the locals  are aware of how she is ill-dressed for a Highland winter. Elsewhere, we see her attempt to adjust her diet. She visits a tea room and tries a slice of cake, but this is clearly, at best, going to be an acquired taste for her - her reflexive reaction is to noisily reject the foreign foodstuff, garnering her quizzical looks from her follow diners.

Man, meanwhile, might not necessarily be the warmest place in which to hide. A paradox emerges; the protagonist's latent capacity for empathy is what prompts her to break away from her alien directive and attempt to assume some kind of place among the humans (it is implied that she spares the deformed man because she identifies too much with his plight as an outsider), yet humans are not themselves shown to be a uniformly empathic species. They too are governed by predatory impulses, and seem just as primed to sniff out and take advantage of her loneliness and vulnerability as she is theirs. Shortly before her encounter with the deformed man, the protagonist narrowly avoids becoming the victim of a gang attack, when a young man approaches her van and gestures at her to wind down her window, and several accomplices descend violently upon the van's bonnet. Other interactions are more ambiguous, and it is hard to distinguish which are rooted in genuine benevolence and which conceal more sinister objectives. While caught in a traffic jam, a fellow motorist has a rose delivered to her by a roadside flower salesman, although his motive for doing so (a random act of kindness? An attempted seduction?) is never established. Later in the film, while on the run from her former life, she is approached by a man on a bus (Michael Moreland) who seems drawn to her vulnerability and offers to help her. He treats her with great compassion, allowing her to stay at his house and serving her food (although she is not seen to eat it), and taking her out on a day trip to the remains of a castle, where he delicately picks her up and carries her over a puddle. He also seems entirely ready to have sexual relations with this non-commutative and potentially damaged stranger, adding a question mark to the purity of his intentions. The attempted intercourse is ultimately thwarted, in a somewhat comical fashion, when the protagonist becomes preoccupied with her own (non-functioning?) genitals.

Before that, the man's attempts to integrate her into his domestic space lead into what I personally rate as the film's funniest, most quietly unnerving and most underrated sequence, when he introduces her to the televised antics of Welsh comedian Tommy Cooper. Cooper holds up a jar and a spoon and makes a barrage of incomprehensible stuttering noises. The man snickers. The studio audience is uproarious laughter. The protagonist stares blankly at the screen, unsure what she is even intended to be perceiving. I'd imagine that Cooper (certainly Cooper out of context) would be a baffling enough experience to anyone who didn't participate in the UK zeitgeist of the 1970s, but the scene touches on far more sinister nerves still. The focus on the protagonist's bewilderment and the continued roaring of the studio audience turns their laughter into a reaction to her reaction. That she isn't in on the joke makes her squarely the butt of it. These noises are a communal expression of emotion from which she is excluded; her status as a perpetual outsider renders her a subject of almost cosmic derision. There is a dark side to this communal expression that perhaps becomes more salient when we consider the circumstances of Cooper's unfortunate death; he collapsed during a live television broadcast in April 1984 and his audience responded with the same uproarious laughter, believing it was part of the act.

The universal characteristic that seems to lurk beneath the skin of the various individuals our protagonist encounters is not really empathy, but vulnerability. Each one is as intrinsically destructible as the next. The realisation that this vulnerability extends to her is what causes the shift in her perspective. Safety in numbers (consider the group of girls the protagonist meets outside of the nightclub) and membership within communities represent one of our most primal, longest-standing tactics for combatting our fragility as individuals. Under The Skin is concerned with the plight of the other, with those for whom such communities are basically impenetrable and offer their own oppressions in place of solidarity. The protagonist never overcomes her loneliness; the disconnect that keeps her from mingling with the humans is not something she figures out how to straddle. After her failure to physically connect with Moreland's character, she appears to give up on integrating herself into civilisation altogether, choosing instead to follow the swimmer's suggestion and to seek out her "nowhere" in a remote stretch of woodland. The solitude that made her human quarry fair game, and expendable in the eyes of their own society, now becomes her sole means of sanctuary.

(Spoilers now follow)

The climax of the film sees a return to the Little Red Riding Hood allusion, with the roles now completely reversed. Here, the wolf seeks refuge amid the seclusion of the woods, only to be greeted by a woodcutter (Dave Action), who attempts to engage her in ostensibly benign small talk. The clue that his intentions are anything but is in how reminiscent his tactics are of her earlier chat-up routine; crucially, he is looking to establish that she has come to the woods all alone. The protagonist is too fatigued or perhaps too fundamentally naive herself to pick up on this. She walks on and comes to what we presume to be the woodcutter's bothy. Curling up inside, she seems to momentarily find her peace; a dissolve shot juxtaposes her with the swaying trees outside, depicting her as a giant in the landscape, comfortably nestled in this perfectly impassive nowhere. This is interrupted by the reappearance of the woodcutter, who attempts to sexually assault her. She flees and he pursues. The reversal is a little further-reaching than the hunter becoming the hunted. The woodcutter is clearly positioned as the interloper in this scenario (the wolf was, after all, the one in its natural habitat), his hulking logging truck an alien vessel on the wooded terrain (one that nearly becomes another trap for the protagonist when she attempts to escape in it), his objective a threat to the equilibrium and to the trees that have provided cover and solace to our protagonist. When he wrestles her to the ground and starts to forcibly tear off her garments, the confrontation is carried through to its grimmest of fairy tale conclusions. Like the wolf in the story, she is physically ruptured; the woodcutter manages to rip open her human skin, giving him a misbegotten glimpse of the dark, uncanny form hidden underneath. He is so repulsed by what he sees that he sneaks away and returns with a can of gasoline and a lighter to set her ablaze. Tellingly, his reapproach is represented via a POV shot that regards his fractured prey with the same chilling detachment as she formerly did her own prospective victims. In aspiring to obliterate what is strange and incomprehensible to his earthly perception, he affirms himself as the inhuman one in the equation.

In spite of the protagonist's demise, the final sequence is not presented as a bleak outcome, but as one of unspoken triumph (a contrast to the more ambiguous ending of Sexy Beast). We see the motorcyclist standing out in the snow-covered horizon, scanning the terrain but apparently not locating her; she has evaded the grasp of her pursuer. We cut to the her charred remains, as smoke rises toward the sky and becomes intermingled with falling snowflakes; the final shot shows the snowflakes falling directly onto the camera, some of them visibly darkened with the protagonist's ashes. This closing image evokes the reincarnation theme of Birth, indicating that this is not the end but the beginning of a renewed cycle; the protagonist has fallen to Earth all over again and has finally found her place within it. It is the same place that awaits all beings that are subject to the same forces of death and decay - the frailty of the flesh and its inevitable breakdown a unifying process that keeps us bound within a natural rhythm as impassive and insurmountable as the thrashing tides, rustling winds and falling snow. Neither human nor other, she now simply is.