Critics reviews

Okay, this movie reminded me a little bit of my own movie, L.A. Zombie, in which an oft-naked alien male zombie trolls Los Angeles looking for dead bodies to literally fuck back to life. Except in this one, an oft-naked female alien zombie (Scarlett Johansson) trolls the Scottish Highlands looking for unsuspecting men to lure into a black underwater space-hell and fuck them to death, more or less.

Under the Skin is a perfect metaphoric and experiential exploration of this epidemic and epidermis of loneliness... Under the Skin's architecture, its sombre materiality and its oppressive mise en scène help create the spatial conditions of brute and fragmented loneliness.

My reading of this picture is specifically about what it means to be a transgender woman in a society that doesn't see that as normative behaviour... Amy is not explicitly a transgender woman, but she represents one in my eyes because her pursuit of finding her humanity is parallel to finding womanhood.

While "Under the Skin" purports to ponder mankind as regarded by an objective, alien gaze, the movie is also a documentary portrait of its wildly objectified star. Ms. Johansson is a sacred monster. What makes the movie most uncanny is the knowledge that her sexy vampire is not a man-hungry femme fatale but an implacable, agendered It.

There are some good ideas in this fourth film by Jonathan Glazer, but none of them seem to take proper flight. What we get however, is an impeccable exercise in cinematography and scoring, like the misty-ridden scene which recalls Antonioni's Identificazione di una donna(1982), but without the undertones that made the master's films the canonic milestones they are today. Probably overrated, but not completely forgettable, Glazer misses by little.

But if Johansson's character is superficially a femme fatale, the film stands as the most probing examination of that type since Brian De Palma named a movie after the trope. Making the most out of limited resources, the film takes advantage of the nearly unintelligible brogues of the Scottish locals, as well as some brilliantly warped sound design, to obscure the speech of everyone talking to the alien...

The eyes are those of the woman-like alien, and her ride feels like a familiar story that goes on perpetuating itself, from era to era, in one form after another. It could be a serviceable device for a porn film, or a vampire film, or perhaps merely a film about a disconnected person interacting inconclusively with a succession of other disconnected persons.

The movie is totally successful at defamiliarizing ordinary actions and objects. When Johansson's alien tries cake (her first taste of normal food), a long close-up follows her fork as it moves with painful slowness towards her mouth; it's like nothing of the kind has ever been filmed or experienced before.

...Considering the evidence, I think this makes Under the Skin Glazer's most strangely optimistic and poetic work. For all we know, the ash we see billowing up into the air is Laura returning home to file her final report on the absurd and brutal contradictions of life on Earth.

I'm as suspicious of the term 'pure cinema' as I am 'guilty pleasure' but there is a kind of purity in Glazer's direction. It could only be attempted in a film, and only by someone who was probing the outer reaches of the medium's capability, possessing some of Johansson's curiosity about what it's capable of.

This arty sci-fi thriller... raises far more questions than it answers, yet that enigmatic quality is central to its appeal. Like Birth (2004)—the previous feature of director Jonathan Glazer, with Nicole Kidman as a woman convinced that her dead lover has been reincarnated as a preteen boy—Under the Skin hints at several different readings without confirming any of them. That makes for an occasionally frustrating viewing experience, yet it also ensures that the film stays with you.

If nothing else, [Under the Skin] confirms Glazer, who had been missing in action for far too long (Birthcame out a decade ago), as both a risk-taker of the first order and an atmospheric virtuoso. With this film, he's taken a novel and stripped it of everything but the aspects that captured his interest, then completely reconceived it for the new medium, creating something damn near unprecedented.