Under the Skin
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Writer: Walter Campbell, Jonathan Glazer
Based on: Michel Faber‘s novel
Cast: Scarlett Johansson

Plot:
A woman (Scarlett Johansson) drives around Scotland, randomly picking up hitchhikers and bringing them home where she kills them. She is always shadowed by a man on a motorbike, until one day she breaks free.

Under the Skin didn’t work for me at all, despite Scarlett Johansson being an attention magnet and the beautiful visuals. But especially for a film about a (probably) female being, it just lacked a female perspective.

[SPOILERS]

Under the Skin is a film that leaves a lot open to interpretation which meant that as I went out of the film, I knew that something had bothered me about it, but I needed some time to figure out what. And then it hit me: this is a film about a woman or a thing that appears to be a woman who uses her attractiveness to lure men to their death (men who are all naive and hapless I might add). [Which is in itself already the rather problematic evil seductress trope, even though it is lightened by the fact that the woman (who doesn’t get a name if I remember correctly) apparently doesn’t mean to be evil.] But even her seduction is controlled or at least very much supervised by apparently male beings. And then she breaks free and tries to become more of her own person. So far, so good.

Her journey also includes discovering her own body – which was shot in such a male-gaze-y way (the camera panning up from her ankles along her naked backside) that I wanted to slap the cameraman/director. And then, in a “don’t suffer a witch to live” twist, at her most independent moment, the woman is almost raped, the violence of which rips her skin so that the alien being underneath is revealed. When her would-be-rapist sees that, he shoots her. Before the film ends all together, we see her supervisors/controllers/protectors looking for her. And I mean, what the fuck is this? The story we’re getting shown is “if you try to be independent as a woman, you’re gonna get raped and killed”, with added undertones of “independent women are alien”. The take away from this, for me, is not “men fuck up your independence by trying to own you” [which might have been what Glazer was going for] – it’s “if you hadn’t left the protection of the men who were just trying to take care of you, you wouldn’t be dead now”. And fuck you for that, film, fuck you.

It doesn’t help either that the film is really slow, barely has any dialogue and that Scarlett Johansson portrays her character with barely any facial expressions (I understand the choice, especially in the beginning, characterwise. But with regards to entertainment/engagement with the character it made things very difficult): the movie just didn’t give you much to hold on to. Even though even expressionless Johansson is still alluring.

The movie does have great visuals, though. Especially the woman’s lair where and how she drags the men to their death was beautiful. I also liked her real form that we get to see in the end. The soundtrack wasn’t my cup of tea generally speaking, but the main theme was awesome. But these few good things didn’t save the film for me.

Summarizing: maybe if there had been more of a female perspective it could have worked. It didn’t.