Elusive. This is the description that best fits Jonathan Glazer's stunningly beautiful, at the same time stunningly ugly, Under the skin. A dry explication of the story would make most people squirm. The magic does certainly not happen in the story (that the film is loosely based on a novel is interesting, but a novel need not glow because of its story, either). This is a film entirely structured according to the associative logic of images. Scarlett Johansen's alien predator patrols the streets of Glasgow (is it Glasgow?); she's hunting for guys to ... well .... drag into a pitch-black romm - an eating-machine! Johansen, using her body as bait, lures them with her with her anonymous, steely gaze. They go with her in her van, sometimes reluctantly. An unknown figure seems to be stalking her on a bicycle.
The strangeness is enhanced by extremely absurd and stylized scenes being interwoven with ultra-gritty shots of rain-soaked streets and brightly lit malls. There is no safe distance between these two styles, the dreamy and otherworldly & the social-realist grit: everything is seamlessly sucked into the film's wandering gaze. (Many have talked about a Hollywood star plopped into the humdrum settings of pedestrian people. I am not too interested in that angle.)
I watched Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth a few weeks before Under the Skin. The two films share a number of thematic and visual features. Both films' take on alienation works with humor in a way that makes the underlying sadness all the more present. Why sadness? Both Bowie and Johansen are detached from human emotions. They observe, and react according to some mechanical pattern. In a scene that drops all the satire and humor, we see Johansen's alien by the shore. She watches an accident. Or does she watch? What would watching mean for this creature?
An extremely weighty dimension of this film is the sound. The music (by Mica Levi): a throbbing, pulse-like score. Worrying dissonance, threatening tones.
Under the skin: in no other film has sex looked so abstract, a boring-beyond-boring activity to trudge through.
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