Under The Skin (2013)

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Under The Skin is an unclassifiable and amazing rarity, its one of those odd masterpieces that cinema delivers us very sporadically, a unique and brilliant sci-fi thriller directed by Jonathan Glazer and based on Michael Faber’s homonymous novel from the year 2000.

The film has received a curious acclaim from critics and certain sectors of the public, many people classify it as a masterpiece, and now it has become a cult film. Jonathan Glazer has been compared with legendary film directors such as Kubrick or Lynch due to his amazing work in this film.

Under The Skin takes an incredible immersion in gigantic themes such as the origins of life and existentialism, and it also has an amazing visual quality, a sublime soundtrack, and a mesmerizing experimental narration.

Everything begins with a small light that glows in the night. In the depths of darkness, we see different substances merging, everything seems to indicate that we are dealing with the elaboration of a human eye, or (what seems more accurate) the eye of an alien creature that has the appearance of a beautiful woman (Scarlett Johansson).

The alien woman (under the protection of a mysterious motorcyclist), travels aboard a truck through the streets of Glasgow / Scotland, in search of solitary men to whom she insinuates sexually . Scenes that, to a certain extent, were filmed with a hidden camera and with real bystanders.

The men, blinded by desire, climb aboard with her, they enter and disappear in a mysterious, bright black liquid. This scene is repeated several times, with extreme coldness and total insensitivity, as if the woman was a psychopath.

Throughout the film, the world seems shrouded in shadows, because night has become the only place where we can be ourselves. The alien, hidden in the shell of a woman, goes into the night with the desire to own other bodies – something not very far from the way in which human beings have ended up relating to each other.

In the rituals of the alien woman to seduce men, some of the most poetic and implacable film sequences can be found in their approach to sexual experience. The film proposes the body as an inaccessible emotional prison, the erotic relationship is only capable of dispossessing these bodies of their own humanity; depriving them of any meaning.

As the woman encounters more men and fulfills the task of seducing and making them disappearing, something in her begins to awaken- the alien woman discovers and questions her spiritual and emotional position in the world. It is here when we perceive that this “skin” in which she lives and that is not hers, will – in contact with the nature of Earth- be transformed into a gate towards humanity.

A feeling is born inside her, and then another, and others… among them: fear and loneliness. Sensibility will take hold and make her go into the evil that roams inside isolated forests, inside the stunning and imposing natural landscapes that the world has to offer. The Earth’s spirit, which at first meant nothing, has finally entered the woman, and will slowly start to consume her soul.

The unrepresentable becomes visible in an indeterminate space; the digital space of convergence between the analogue image and the virtual image. The film penetrates under the skin in a double gesture: physically and discursively.

by Octavio Carbajal González