Movie review by Greg Carlson

Sharing connections with science fiction movies as wildly different as “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” “The Brother from Another Planet,” “Lifeforce,” and “Species,” “Under the Skin” represents director Jonathan Glazer’s boldest and most satisfying work to date. As hypnotic, hallucinogenic, and inscrutable as some of Stanley Kubrick’s most artful filmmaking, “Under the Skin” demands multiple viewings to process the exhilarating effects of its image-driven, pure cinema. Anchored by a confident performance by Scarlett Johansson as an alien who guides male quarry to their oblivion, Glazer’s ambitions go well beyond the deceptively simple storyline.

The director completely reimagines Michel Faber’s 2000 novel of the same title, withholding significant elements of plot while retaining the thematic heart of the central figure’s journey of self-discovery. On paper, Faber’s preoccupation with the welfare of animals processed for consumption as food is manifested in a Swiftian allegory that Glazer almost entirely eliminates, throwing over the novelist’s dark satire of greedy business practices and the gulf between poverty and privilege for a subjective experience that deliberately defies easy explanation.

“Under the Skin” is filled with episodes and moments that shimmer and vibrate with dread and anxiety, yet the viewer is also invited to share the alien’s curiosity at the ways of our world. There is no doubt that some will grow impatient with Glazer’s cryptic puzzles. Johansson’s extra-terrestrial works with a motorcycling, male-inhabiting counterpart, but any expository conversation between the two is suppressed and the figure remains an enigma upon which we can only speculate. That relationship alludes to the book, as does a scene in which the protagonist meets her match in a rich piece of layer cake.

The brilliance of Glazer’s reinterpretation of Faber’s world is expressed most radically in the interactions between the predator and the men she meets. Many of the film’s most unforgettable scenes, including the jaw-dropping final outcome, do not appear in the original writing. A surreal attempted rescue from drowning that ends with a stomach-turning reminder of the limits of the alien’s ability to show empathy parallels a later sequence (featuring Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis) that may signal a turning point in the creature’s psychological development via a newfound capacity for mercy.

One of the most significant book-to-film alterations changes the alien’s method of dispatching victims. Glazer omits the novel’s needle-injected anesthetic – administered through passenger seat upholstery with the flick of a switch – in favor of a sensuous seduction dance that unfolds at the alien’s lair. The design of the space, cloaked in inky obscurity but for an eerie and reflective surface tension on the floor, is as disorienting as the sight of the disrobing couple is pulse-quickening. Once submerged in the liquid suspension that bears the weight of the alien like an unholy corruption of Christ’s miracle at the Sea of Galilee, fate is sealed and the point of no return passed.

Glazer’s methods for capturing the unaffected reactions of the men who approach the alien’s van have received a great deal of attention. Shooting with hidden cameras and communicating with Johansson via an earpiece in the manner of Jean-Luc Godard on “Masculin Feminin,” “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her” and “La Chinoise,” Glazer patrolled the streets of Glasgow in search of faces that appealed to him. Only after the initial interactions were captured would the pedestrians be alerted to the unusual circumstances and offered the opportunity to fill out the necessary paperwork (a few recognized Johansson). This candid camera effect, employed to comic ends in “Borat,” is closer here in application to Yimou Zhang’s “The Story of Qiu Ju,” raising a few tantalizing ethical questions in regard to its documentary-like, observational aura.

Johansson’s character, unnamed in the film, is called Isserley in the novel, and the reader is offered more detailed explanations about her sinister vocation on Earth than Glazer does on screen. Faber reminds us often that Isserley has endured a monumental physical sacrifice to pass for human, and the book makes constant reference to Isserley’s spinal pain. The rich subtext concerning body image and sexual attractiveness remains an essential component in Glazer’s vision, and “Under the Skin” has already been pegged as both a deconstruction/inversion of rape culture and a willing participant in traditional cinematic objectification of the female body. That the text can sustain both of these disparate interpretations is but one measure of its magnetic pull.