What makes a human a human? Appearance? Body parts? Or something much deeper? This is one of the questions pondered by Jonathan Glazer’s interesting, if not quite exceptional Under the Skin.
Scarlett Johansson plays an alien that trolls around Scotland in a van picking up random men and luring them to their death as food for her alien civilization. She’s stoic and silent in between her encounters, and only awkwardly picks up the men. She relies on her beauty, mostly, and her victims’ stupidity in the face of their Penthouse letters dream seemingly realized. Eventually the alien has an encounter that causes her to ponder her own existence and sets her off into an exploration of humanity.
The interactions with men are mostly shot in a reality show-esque style giving the first half a kind of staged realism mixed with the surreal trap into which the men find themselves. It's a little too stylized to call magical realism. Except for a couple notable alien sequences, the film is determinedly low-key visually (the wintry Scotland and everything in it is grimy and might as well be colorless), although the musical score is rather imposing (but good). The film is always interesting but never rises to the level of particularly great. Men do not come off well here, which some have interpreted as Glazer turning the tables on sexual predation. Perhaps, but the most interesting aspect here is the commentary on the nature of humanity and the impact of physical appearance when what is under the skin is truly what makes us human.
Screened in the theater. The publicity folks are getting a lot of play from Johansson appearing nude, but that is getting far more coverage than it deserves (i.e., I hope you don't pay money to see it just for that).
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