"Under the Skin"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

With all of the recent chatter about a certain boat movie of Biblical proportions that everyone seems to know and care so much about, some other movies may have slipped under your radar. There is one about bears, several about superheroes, and a couple of others about creepy children who may or may not be demon possessed. Then there is a baseball movie with Kevin Costner and a cartoon sequel. Yes indeed, there are many non-boat movies to be seen and maybe even talked about.

But let me recommend one such movie: “Under the Skin”. Warning: This movie is arty and weird. It is not like the superhero movies, the creepy-kid movies, the cartoon sequels, or indeed, the boat movie. I say thank God for that. But really I’m just letting you know.

In “Under the Skin” an alien who is fixed up to look just like a human (Scarlett Johansson) rides around Scotland in a van picking up men who she seduces and then kills. We have no idea what sort of alien she is, what her motives are, or even what she is up to or how she is doing what she is doing. Everything is as perplexing and foreign to us as our world must be to her.

And the world certainly is perplexing and foreign to her. In one of the first scenes of the movie, the cold and lifeless body of an anonymous dead woman is laid out in front of the alien on the vacant floor of a brightly backlit room. A tear falls from the dead woman’s eye. The alien reaches down as if to wipe the tear away—as if to show compassion—but instead she scoops up an ant that was crawling on the body and carefully examines it as if under a microscope. The ant is what is noteworthy to her. How peculiar it must be to her—how novel and curious.

Thus is how the alien sees the world. She has her mission, and she knows how to carry it out. But, as is made clear through various wonderfully executed cinematic techniques, this entity is indeed alien—she is foreign; this is not her home; she is out of place; nothing makes sense to her. This is also true of us, the audience. Bewilderment is something we share with the alien—that, and the skin that covers our bodies.

As time goes on the alien grows more accustomed to the human exterior that envelops her. She maybe even starts to think human thoughts and feel human feelings. But this is no fable about diversity or the coming together of different peoples. “Under the Skin” is way darker and, really, just way more nuanced and complex than that.

I’m not sure what all is going on in “Under the Skin”. There are other movies where I’m not sure what is going on and I think it’s because not much is really going on—it’s just that the director thinks he or she is really smart and deep so he or she makes a movie that looks really smart and deep but it is just pretentious and lame. “Under the Skin” is not one of those movies. A lot is going on here. But I’m just not sure, at least at this point, what all it is.

What I can tell you is that this movie will seep in—it will get under your skin. You will leave the theater still looking out at a strange and unfamiliar world that you see every day but which is suddenly new, foreign, challenging and confusing.