I join the nay-sayers on this one, but before I do, it’s worth talking about some of the things that Jonathan Glazer does right in Under the Skin. For one, he has a knack for visuals. The fade-ins are repeatedly effective, with the one of a forest fading in very slowly over the image of the sleeping heroine especially so. There is also excellent point-of-view editing when we’re in the alien’s head and seeing what she’s seeing: the urban streets, the natural areas, the nightclub. This distance and lack of interpretation of what we see with her conveys the mute, observational aspect of Johansson’s character. Glazer also does a fine job of maintaining a consistently dark tone throughout. Most of the film is either at nighttime or during rainy or snowy weather. Even active night scenes are dark with some garish colors flaring in.
And the director has a good sense of visual effectiveness. The understated, gray scene of the drowning stays in the memory, anchored there by the screaming baby that the aliens ignore. The powerful gray in the visuals of this scene convey not only the predators’ own strength but also their lack of flair or distinctiveness. Another well-conceived visual, the reflective trap that Johansson lures her prey into, has a place in this same unforgiving gray. To Glazer’s credit, the visuals are so powerful inUnder the Skin that little dialog is needed or used. From the opening abstract scenes to the snowy fire at the end of the film, Glazer tells his story with a bare modicum of dialog, and even the speech we hear has a pro forma quality to it.
But despite the lack of dialog, one the most effective elements here is how the soundtrack functions. In the opening, we hear someone practicing English phonemes, learning to talk from a basic level, suggesting the alien learning a new language. As the film gets underway, much of the speech is indistinct, with overheard clips of unfinished words or sentences until Johansson talks with a victim, when the dialog comes clear. This sound engineering evokes the alien lack of understanding or care for the communication happening around her. And the screechy musical soundtrack, altogether lacking melody or rhythm and generally in minor key, is an appropriate choice to communicate an inhuman sensibility. All these directorial decisions make the soundtrack a crucial element in the film.
But for all its technical triumph, Under the Skin ultimately fails to engage, and this failure comes from significant directorial decisions. One major problem is the director’s heavy hand that, while not giving us tedious exposition, still seems compelled to hit us on the nose with meaning. When Johansson is first taking the clothes she is to wear on earth, the Johansson she is taking them from sheds a tear. This unnecessary, obvious message tells us the rest of the story: An alien is unwillingly taken from the earth she had grown to love. With that heavy-handed foreshadowing, the movie loses suspense and becomes a fill-in-the-blank set of details for the telegraphed plot, and this plot itself is somewhat conventional. We await her seduction by humanity and her being hunted down by her handlers. There’s a similarly on-the-nose moment when Johansson sees a fly trapped inside a window and decides to free her latest victim. It’s as though Glazer doesn’t trust the limited dialog or Johansson’s acting enough to allow them to communicate the character’s moral development, so he adds a metaphor that is too literal to miss. This same telegraphing is also obvious when Johansson is walking in the woods and meets a lumber worker who asks if she is alone. Her role reversal from predator to prey is already well-established in the film at this point without this klunky echo of her own dialog as a predator. And the remainder of the film is telegraphed in that single line of dialog as we know the man will soon hunt her down. Glazer also occasionally uses the otherwise skilled soundtrack to cue what the audience is supposed to feel. Minor key music tells us when things are disturbed, but when something nice – like a kiss – occurs, the music shifts suddenly into a happy major key. The director's lack of subtlety with such elements in Under the Skin ultimately leaves the audience feeling clumsily manipulated.
Although all this this obviousness lessens the impact of the film, it’s actually Glazer’s direction of Johansson that most cripples it. Throughout the film, Johansson is an unresponsive, observing alien through whose flat, uncaring perspective we see, and the result of this perspective is that we experience a flat, unengaging world. Even late in the film, when she’s supposedly experienced some growth, the alien has only muted or animalistic responses and doesn’t convey real knowledge or insight. Glazer’s clear choice to hold Johansson back has the unfortunate effect of leaving the audience outside the film, uninterested and without investment in the outcome. Given this decision, we don’t much care what happens by the end of the film, we aren’t involved with a character whose arc we can’t discern, and we find ourselves having watched nearly two hours of things happening. I left this film with a shrug.
There are several contemporary British directors who have shown themselves technically proficient at filmmaking but who don’t create engagement in their films: Christopher Nolan comes to mind, as does Danny Boyle and even Ridley Scott. It’s this tendency in Under the Skin that makes the film an academic exercise more than an encounter with knowledge and experience. And a disappointment.
