In light of The Zone of Interest’s Oscar win and Jonathan Glazer’s courageous words at the podium, the time felt ripe to revisit the director’s extraordinary Under the Skin — a movie that shares much with its decorated follow-up. Both films are about looking, and both films are about the tension between humanity and inhumanity. Though in Under the Skin (loosely based on the science fiction novel by Michael Faber), the inhumanity is more literal. Laura is an extraterrestrial being wearing the skin of Scarlett Johansson, and her job on Earth is simple: cruise the streets of Glasgow in an unmarked van, pick up unsuspecting men who find her attractive, and take them back to her otherworldly lair. There, the men — hypnotized by the image of a naked Laura walking away from them — are lured into a black pool and dissolved for food, energy, or something yet more sinister. If all that sounds rather grisly, I’ll remind you that Glazer is a true visionary whose work never takes the form you’d expect it to. His primary visual mode here is not one of grotesquery, but of surveillance: Laura’s van is rigged with small digital cameras, and some of the men who appear at her window aren’t aware that they’re being filmed, let alone talking to one of the biggest stars on the planet. In the process, Glazer portrays an undeniable reality about the way men look at women, made all the more compelling by the fact that — in the fictional story — Laura is an alien exploiting that reality. The movie’s centerpiece sequence expands on all this, and is among the most moving things I’ve ever seen. Laura picks up real-life neurofibromatosis case Adam Pearson, and at this point doesn’t know humans well enough to understand that some are perceived differently because of the way they look. So she doesn’t flinch or even bat an eyelid at Pearson’s character, whose experience of Laura’s loving gaze is perhaps the first time in his life that he’s been looked at this way. The encounter shakes both to their core, and it’s no coincidence that it pushes Laura’s curiosity about humanity over the edge; from there on, she tries to cosplay as a human, and inevitably experiences the good, the ugly, and the downright evil that our species has to offer. But along the way she does confront the nature of love, which for her is a strange extraterrestrial force that must be reckoned with. All told, Under the Skin — backed by Mica Levi’s incredible, brazenly experimental score — is for my money the best and most innovative film of the 2010s. Glazer doesn’t speak often, but when he does he’s graceful, surprising, and eloquent. Just as he was on Sunday night.
Streaming on Max and Kanopy; available for rent on Apple TV, Amazon, and other platforms.
amazing rec!! im writing about glazer too this week and will def be linking this