Under The Skin is about a mysterious woman, who is clearly not a human being, played by Scarlett Johansson, on a vaguely predatory mission on the streets of the United Kingdom. She begins to question where she belongs in the world and distinguishes what she truly wants from what she is supposed to do. I must confess that while watching Under The Skin, I cheated and looked up the Wikipedia entry of the book that inspired the film. I wanted to confirm whether or not I was on the right track (I was).
Under The Skin is art, not necessarily an entertaining or enjoyable experience for the average viewer unless you are really invested in seeing Johansson naked. If you are really into movies with little to no explanation or dialogue, but solely rely on visuals to tell the story—think the final scenes of 2001, which Under The Skin references in its opening scenes, then you should definitely see it. If you don’t mind ambiguity in your narratives, then you won’t leave angry. Objectively I think that I should see Under The Skin again to truly appreciate it, and that Under The Skin is one of the most essential films of our time. Despite being inspired by a book, Under The Skin can only work as a film because it wordlessly shows the point of view of beings that are not like us, but have priorities and objectives that are completely foreign to us. If you convey those concepts in words, it would be like us even in the way that it obeys grammar and human language rules (see Arrival if you have further questions). Under The Skin is an appropriately surreal visual experience.
Don’t let my praise make you think that you should give Under The Skin a chance. Under The Skin may be sci-fi in the same way that 2001 was sci-fi: they share premises not rooted in our reality, but are more about the nature of humanity. That meditation can be boring. I also thought it dragged and could not wait for the experience to end because I was tired. I was done at the sixty-minute mark. I needed to use subtitles because I could not understand the Scottish accent. Even though Under The Skin explored many themes well, it simultaneously felt belabored, but when I ask myself what I would cut from the film, I honestly could not think of anything. I understand that my subjective experience rates Under The Skin lower marks than Jonathan Glazer, who also directed Sexy Beast, deserves.
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Under The Skin is a really interesting story about gender assumptions within humanity. In the book, which I have not read, the main character is an alien harvesting human males for food, but viewers who know more about Irish and Scottish folklore argue that she has similar traits to a selkie, who can be both male or female, are similar to a seal shape shifter, sheds skin to become human on land and are very seductive, but always return to the sea. If you cross a selkie, it can lead to drowning, but tales about selkie are usually romantic family tragedies. Glazer is a British director who admitted that the book was only inspiration, not cannon, so both could be right. Glazer could be using selkie traits to describe aliens.
Under The Skin has a lot of drowning imagery: the married couple drowning in the ocean trying to save another family member, the male victims submerged when walking on a black floor as they nakedly follow Johansson to an expected sexual encounter then later completely dissolved (vagina dentate), and finally Johansson in a crowd of women going to the club, which understandably alarms her. After all if you were a friendly, seductive looking woman who whisks men away to oblivion, why would you think that this group of women was any different?
Under The Skin starkly depicts the oddities of gender dynamics by subverting them in the movie and switching the roles of who is predator and who is prey. No woman in her right mind would talk to a handsome man in a van asking her if she was alone without being suspicious, but numerous men happily chatted with a pretty brunette in a van blissfully unaware that she was a world famous actor, and that they were being filmed until later when the filmmaker asked for permission to use the footage. Men don’t see women as potential predators and don’t feel in danger around them. They are not taught cautious behavior.
Early in Under The Skin, Johansson’s character is a cold, focused hunter. She appears to be female, but she doesn’t even glance at babies when there is a man who needs to be literally hit over the head with a rock and dragged away caveman style. She stomps through the cold water indifferent to how it affects her clothes or if it makes her feel cold. She looks like a woman, but she is not, and we know this because she does not act how we believe a woman acts (or should). Only when she trips and falls while walking on a busy street, does she begin to notice other people, look at herself in the mirror and become empathetic. She also compares herself to others and finds herself lacking and wants to change—she finally becomes a woman.
Johanson’s character only becomes vulnerable when she abandons the white van and ditches her leopard coat, her predator signifiers. In an earlier scene, before the transformation, a mob of rowdy men chase her van, but she is unperturbed perhaps because she is unaware of and does not care about their intentions. When she tries to become an ordinary human woman and becomes invested in participating in human experiences, she fails, becomes victimized and dies. In another film, the human man who discovers and kills the alien is the hero, but here it is the natural part of human female existence-a constant vulnerability to sexual assault and possibly death. She literally has to face herself. Under The Skin paints a dismal picture of life as a human female. It is a life of exile and an inability to satisfy others’ impossible demands or discover what you want independent from others’ desires, well-intentioned or otherwise. Human society will make you doubt yourself and inevitably lead to inadequacy and death.
Side note: here is a list of the times that Scarlett Johansson played a something other or more than a human female: The Island, Under The Skin, Her, Lucy.