This astonishing film will leave you at once entranced and terrified.
Dir: Jonathan Glazer; Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy McWilliams
Bones, nerves, blood and meat: if you heave open a copy of Anatomy of the Human Body, by Henry Gray, or simply fall out of a tree, it soon becomes clear that we are all made of the same stuff underneath. Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin (see the trailer here ), which was shown in competition at the Venice Film Festival earlier today, presents us with a person who isn’t.
This is Glazer’s third film and his first for nine years since Birth, a mesmerisingly strange romance starring Nicole Kidman that premiered at Venice in 2004. Back then, that film was enthusiastically booed, and Under The Skin, which is loosely based on a book by Michel Faber, has followed proudly in its footsteps.
At this morning’s screening, delegates were twitching, tutting, wriggling and scratching, as if Glazer’s film was turning the air in the cinema to vaporised acid. When the credits rolled, the farmyard noises began, although if my legs hadn’t been so wobbly and my mouth so dry, I would have climbed up on my seat and cheered.
So the film is certainly divisive: but would you expect anything else from an almost wordless science-fiction thriller in which Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who lures lonely and/or horny Glaswegians into her van and turns them into Scotch broth? In Faber’s book, the alien is called Isserley, and she works for an intergalactic corporation who harvest meaty hitchhikers for their muscles, which are a delicacy back home.
But with a butcher’s precision, Glazer has trimmed away the story’s fat and gristle, and the operation is presented as something far stranger, and less readily explicable. A motorcyclist, credited as The Bad Man and played by the professional road racer Jeremy McWilliams, could be Johansson’s immediate supervisor – but Glazer largely leaves you to make sense of his images by yourself, or simply to wallow in them when you can’t.
The film was shot on location in Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands, much of it undercover and on the hoof. Johansson, who appears in a tangled black wig and is not immediately recognisable, went into nightclubs and shopping centres followed by hidden cameras, and the reactions of the people in the background are entirely real and authentic. In one sequence she trips and falls on what I think is Buchanan Street, and passers-by cluster round to help. Johansson’s cool bemusement at this simple, human response is one of the most chillingly inhuman things I have ever seen.
She takes care to pick off men who won’t be missed: lonely souls out late at night with no girlfriends or wives to come looking for them. They get into her van, and the next we see of them they are walking into a black room, naked and visibly aroused, tempted forward by Mica Levi’s metronomic score and Johansson’s impossible body: you might almost be watching an ancient fertility rite.
As her victims move towards her, they start sinking downwards, until finally their head slips under the floor like the surface of an oil slick. What happens next we see only once, although the images in Under the Skin are not shaken off easily, and once is definitely enough.
Johansson is nothing short of iconic here; her character is a classic femme fatale in the film noir tradition, down to the plump red lips and deep fur coat, but with a refrigerated nothingness at her core. She looks at her fellow cast members as if they are from another planet – which is, of course, exactly as it should be. Even the Scottish landscape looks alien: dawn mist rolls across lochs like curls of space dust.
Glazer’s astonishing film takes you to a place where the everyday becomes suddenly strange, and fear and seduction become one and the same. You stare at the screen, at once entranced and terrified, and step forward into the slick.
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