Under the Skin

After a ten-year hiatus from cinema, director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth) returns with his third feature Under The Skin, an art-house sci-fi drama based very loosely on Michel Faber’s debut novel of the same name. Scarlett Johansson stars as an alien sent to Earth for nefarious purposes that she herself may not fully understand. Glazer dispenses with most of the book’s plot in favor of creating a mysteriously unsettling atmosphere and an ambiguous narrative that continuously raises more questions than it answers. However the story, such as it is, never confuses and certainly succeeds in getting under your skin if you are willing to just let it unfold before you. The film’s stark images, atonal soundtrack and impenetrable diegesis stay with you long after the credits roll. Still, I found it difficult to keep from comparing Glazer’s picture with more ambitious works of equivocal, meditative sci-fi--especially Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth from 1976--and even after it reached its poetic conclusion, Under The Skin seemed to come up a little short. It’s not that the film is flawed; it just plays out over an extremely small canvas. I got everything it had to offer after just one screening, which is not the best thing to say about an enigmatic, surreal, would-be cult movie like this.