Under The Skin

This is a weird film, but I liked it. The beginning and most of the middle don't make sense until the end... but there are plenty of little clues to keep you interested, or at least intrigued, by the slow parts.

The reported budget for Under The Skin was £8,000,000. I'm guessing most of that was Scarlett Johansson's fee, because I'd class the look of the film as very much in the low-budget category (I don't mean that in a bad way) and according to the blu-ray extras most of the actors were amateurs.

SPOILERS

At the very start there are some odd lighting effects that look in turns like stars, or planets, or some sort of broken camera lens effect. Maybe this is supposed to convey space and/or time travel. It didn't mean anything to me. Then we see a motorcyclist racing along narrow Scottish roads and the film gets going.

The motorcyclist (as I'll call him... because no-one in this film has an actual name that we learn) meets a van coming in the opposite direction. Both stop. The motorcyclist then walks calmly off the road into the dark and re-appears with a woman over his shoulder. He puts the woman in the back of the van. Odd?

Next we see the (dead?) woman being undressed by a naked woman (played by Scarlett Johansson). The scenery is completely white and featureless. Is this the back of the van? We see the dead woman's face a few times, but not very clearly. She looks a lot like the other woman. The woman puts on the dead woman's clothes and touches her skin as if curious about something. Then we see the woman driving the van.

She drives the van about a lot. Mostly in a large town / city at night. Glasgow probably.

Eventually she starts approaching single men and asking them directions, but also questions to determine if they are single and live alone. I found this part quite slow, but I suppose it was necessary to show that the woman didn't just hit the ground running, she had to work at her strategy.

I really liked the way that the action escalates ever so slightly each time the woman finds a new "victim". The first time we just see a guy get in the van, then it cuts straight to the woman in the van alone again. The next time we see the guy follow the woman into her house. And so on.

It's not really clear what the woman is doing to these men. Just as the van scene was white and featureless, the house scenes are black and featureless. The men seem to just sink into a black liquid whilst transfixed on the woman. Later the woman chooses a disfigured man as her victim and he seems to partially realise what is happening - "We are dreaming?" he says, "Yes, we are dreaming." replies the woman. We see him start to sink, but then the camera cuts to the woman leaving the house.

She stops to look in an old mirror, for a long time. I wasn't sure if she was deciding whether or not to release the disfigured man, or checking her "condition" because she hadn't "eaten" for a long time. On balance, I think the latter, because she probably decided to free him when he realised what was happening... or maybe he was just lucky and she got tired of killing people. Anyway, I think the sinking into black liquid was just how the men felt as they were being absorbed somehow by the woman.

So, the disfigured man is released and wanders off naked. Somehow though the motorcyclist knows this and goes after him. He catches him and, presumably, kills him. Earlier in the film I thought that the motorcyclist was simply a male version of the woman and that he was off doing the same thing she was. But later he seemed to be more of a guardian / troubleshooter for her ... this is never resolved.

Having lost her "appetite" for people the woman then wanders off (abandoning the van). She eventually meets a man who helps her, seemingly out of kindness. Eventually they kiss and start to have sex. The woman seems very inexperienced but goes along with it until the man tries to penetrate her. Frantically she pushes him away and examines her vagina with a lamp... quite disturbing for the man!

The woman leaves the man's house and wanders in a forest. She is attacked by a man who is working there and he tries to rape her. In the struggle the woman's skin tears and the man runs away in horror.

We finally see that the woman is a black alien creature. Is this why the men sank into a black liquid? And we know why the dead woman looked like the naked woman at the start. The alien wasn't just taking her clothes, it copied her skin too... that's why it was touching her so curiously.

Does her skin tear because she hasn't absorbed anyone for a while? Earlier when she falls in the street she stays down for a long time, as if worried that she might have torn then. So maybe the false skin is just delicate. The creature certainly seems to be lost in despair now.

The very last part was slightly gratuitous, I thought. The rapist returns with a can of petrol, douses the alien and burns it alive. Then we see the motorcyclist, who has been looking for the woman, stopped and suddenly with no idea where to go... as if following a signal which has gone dead.

Brilliant. The film is only about 100 minutes long but manages to build up so many interesting questions... only a few of which it answers. We have to work out for ourselves what the alien / aliens were doing here and what the motorcyclist did next.