Under the Skin

The most unsettling science fiction does not always need to explain where a creature comes from, exactly what it wants or how its world works. Under the Skin understands that from the beginning and builds its power through observation, silence and a constant sense of strangeness. Its premise could almost be reduced to something close to Species: a non-human presence uses a female appearance to attract men. But Jonathan Glazer takes that idea somewhere much colder, more abstract and more disturbing.

What stands out first is the way the film looks at human beings from the outside. Scarlett Johansson plays someone who seems to study gestures, conversations, bodies and behavior as if she were learning an unknown species. At first that gaze is clinical, almost predatory, but gradually something harder to define appears: curiosity, confusion, vulnerability. That is where the film stops being merely a hunting story and becomes a reflection on identity and belonging.

Johansson is extraordinary precisely because she does so little. Her performance depends on tiny changes in her eyes, posture and the way she listens. She does not need to explain what she feels; often we are not even sure she feels what we think we are seeing. That ambiguity makes her face and body essential parts of the story. The film uses her beauty as a tool of seduction, then begins to question it: what does it mean to inhabit a human body without being human?

The visual design is one of the film's greatest achievements. Dark spaces, black surfaces, roads, rain and Scottish landscapes create a strange mixture of realism and nightmare. Some scenes feel almost documentary-like, while others work like mental images. That combination makes the film feel familiar and alien at the same time.

Mica Levi's score is fundamental. It does not simply accompany the images; it seems to distort them. Repetitive, abrasive, almost physical sounds turn ordinary situations into something uncomfortable. Few scores can create a feeling of threat before we even know why we should feel threatened.

I am also fascinated by the way she chooses her targets. She is not simply looking for available men, but for isolated people with few strong ties, people whose absence might take longer to be noticed. That makes her behavior even more disturbing because it implies social learning: she understands not only how to attract, but how to identify vulnerability.

The film begins to change when that observation stops being one-sided. The protagonist starts experiencing aspects of human life that she had previously used only from the outside. Kindness, intimacy, desire, the body, trust and fear stop being merely foreign mechanisms. That shift is slow, but it gives genuine emotional weight to a film that initially seemed deliberately cold.

There is also a powerful reading here about gender and power. For much of the film she occupies the position of predator and men are the exposed ones. Yet the closer she gets to human experience, the more she discovers that vulnerability is part of it too. Glazer does not turn this into a simple moral lesson; he lets it remain uncomfortable and deeply sad.

Not everything worked equally well for me. The pace is very slow, and the repetition of certain patterns can become tiring. The narrative is minimal, and anyone who needs clear explanations may end up frustrated. I can completely understand why some viewers might find it empty or pretentious. This is a film that asks you to accept that many questions will remain unanswered.

For me, however, that lack of explanation is one of its strengths. The less specific the mythology becomes, the more disturbing it feels. Knowing exactly who they are, what they want or how everything works would turn the film into much more conventional science fiction. Glazer prefers to keep us in the same uncertain position as his protagonist: observing something we never fully understand.

Under the Skin struck me as strange, cold and very beautiful, but also sadder than I expected. Beneath its science-fiction surface is a story about someone who begins by looking at humans as objects and ends up moving too close to what she was trying to imitate. Scarlett Johansson holds everything together with a magnetic, minimal performance, while Glazer makes the fear come less from what we see than from the feeling that we never completely understand what we are seeing.