Movie Review--Under The Skin

"You've very nice hands.  You've beautiful hands."

--The alien, Under the Skin

On the level of the characters, Scarlett Johansson carries most of Under the Skin alone as an alien who deceives human men into being trapped for seeming use as food, with most other characters dying or not staying around for more than a handful of scenes.  Some of the secondary characters nevertheless make for quite the examples of human individuality and even suffering as the predatory extraterrestrial begins to identify with humanity.  Indeed, if it was not for the sinister, abusive actions of the creature, some of her moments with the men she selects would be sweet in another context--a deformed man she compliments pinches himself when a woman shows interest in him, for instance, despite sexual interest being irrelevant to why we humans need to notice and interact with each other.  Under the Skin subtly emphasizes both how women and men are pressured to alienate, dehumanize, and misunderstand each other by longstanding cultural traditions that only exist because of irrationalists; sexism does not oppress just one gender (fucking conservatives and liberals need to face extreme scorn for denying this in their respective ways).  It also offers a portrayal of everyday humans from the perspective of a malevolent outsider who starts to see humanity for the emotional capacity that cannot be seen by looking at the body.  Empathy, though it has absolutely nothing to do with whether morality exists or what particular moral obligations probably exist, is what this movie comes to concentrate on.

Production Values

Populated with minimal effects and even sparse dialogue, Under the Skin is plainly centered on the initial emotional distance between the alien and her human, male prey that gives way to a desire to be like the humans she has victimized.  The scenes of totally black or white surroundings only contrasted by the alien and the men she targets make the sexualized encounters very distinctly non-sensual, and most of the runtime is devoted to long periods of silence while the extraterrestrial picks men or reflects on her worldview and motivations.  There are many wordless scenes.  In these moments, Scarlett Johansson shows her strengths as an actress who needs nothing more than blank expressions or glances at other people to establish so much about her character.  The way Johansson's face shifts to showing not a hint of the smile and predatory interest she showed only moments before cements this, but she handles a pivotal decision where she outwardly expresses regret over her actions rather wonderfully.  What is at first a largely expressionless face is eventually replaced with an awe, curiosity, and sometimes fear as her character experiences life more and more as if she is human.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

An alien being recites English sounds and words, immersed in a white light.  It soon removes the clothing of a dead/dying woman so that it can wear them.  This creature drives around Scotland in hopes of finding men it--why it specifically wants or needs men for this purpose is never revealed, but they are implied to be used as meat for an offworld species.  She occasionally finds herself in a situation where she is being treated like prey by men, but she gathers enough human subjects to perhaps begin to sympathize with them even before a fateful encounter with a deformed man, whom she rescues from the dark processing "room" or dimension that she puts her victims in.  After this, she has an existential crisis and desperately tries to act more and more as if she, too, is a human.

Intellectual Content

Irrationalists have misunderstood Under the Skin to be about how the societal encouragement to sexually objectify women, but it is not at all as much about this as it is about how many men are conditioned by complementarian societies to be emotionally vulnerable or isolated.  Hell, the movie is literally about an alien woman targeting men specifically, a glaringly sexist goal, and somehow the secondary themes about sexism against women are mistaken for the main point!  Some of the men the alien speaks with do not actually act as if they are singularly focused on her subjective sex appeal, if they find her sexy in the first place--and no, not every man will find every woman sexually attractive even if they are physically beautiful, not that sexual attraction is itself objectification regardless of someone's gender.  Other men express sexual interest in her without themselves being predatory, while a group of other men in one scene attacks her vehicle, perhaps hoping to rape her (the man at the end was trying to rape her).  Men are no more monolithic than women, which is not at all.  Humans, including men and women, are not stereotypes, but individual people.

Even how various male characters pursue, enjoy, or silently endure isolation, a factor the alien searches for in her victims, reflects individuality.  One of the first men the alien speaks to says he loves living alone--isolation is not necessarily going to be coveted or feared by everyone.  Later on, a man with a deformed face lets his silence elaborate for him after he says that he only goes to the supermarket at night because people are "ignorant," as he puts it.  Both his words and his reluctance to speak say all that they need to about his own different experience with isolation.  The alien probes about his life, saying that he has beautiful hands, perhaps the first time he had ever had a woman say something kind or admiring about his body.  It is this man whom the alien releases from her den as she enters an existential crisis about her nature and that of humans.  Very little is shown about the aliens beyond their impersonation of humans, but they at least have the capacity for developing empathy.

Conclusion

Its few words and its unique imagery make Under the Skin a bizarre and bold look into different aspects of humankind, defying gender stereotypes while exploring the potential for empathy to have an unexpected power.  Rarely do movies rely on the absence of dialogue to communicate more than the words of the characters do, and an abnormally large amount of human nature is explored through this restraint.  Like Eternals, Prometheus, and other such existential science fiction films, Under the Skin is more about dwelling on deep issues than it is about bringing attention to the exact necessary truths of logic that dictate those issues and celebrating the precise details that can be proven about them.  When done right, of course, this kind of approach in entertainment is still a grand thing, for it still focuses on matters of substance.  Scarlett Johansson is to a large extent a key part of why this movie pulls this off.  An actress capable of letting her expressions tell more than her words is just what the role needed.  Johansson delivered.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  The relatively sparse, fairly tame violence is more limited to a few blows every now and then. though the removal of a man's internal organs is shown as he is suspended in a breathable liquid.

 2.  Profanity:  Words like "fuck" and "shite" are used sparingly. 

 3.  Nudity:  Full frontal male and female nudity is seen in both sexual and nonsexual contexts.  Unlike most movies, Under the Skin does not hide genitalia, showing even an erect penis more than once.

 4.  Sexuality:  Multiple men are shown following the alien as she lures them to their doom, both she and her victims removing clothing in a sexual context or walking fully naked.