As a young woman stares out of her car window with extraterrestrial curiosity, she seems to be peering into the enigmatic murk of everyday human life. She drives a nondescript white van across frosty Glaswegian highways and bursts of streetlamp illumine her rain-spattered window. Outside, Scotland pulses with pre-apocalyptic anxiety, a picture of perfect ordinariness just waiting for interruption. Our heroine is an otherworldly figure of dangerous allure: a Scarlett Johansson with pillow lips smeared with crimson and surveillance-camera eyes slurping up the strange world around her. In atmospheric terms alone, director Jonathan Glazer has imagined a perfect pitch of terror to accompany this haunting sci-fi masterpiece. Under the Skin is a web of perplexities and suspended mysteries. It travels with glacial slowness, mastering the instruments of tension. The shrill rasp of violin, the nervous scratch of bow against strings, creates an unparalleled ambience of torment and alienation.
In Michel Faber’s novel, which the film artistically adapts, the author explains the young woman’s motives – it belongs to a sinister conspiracy of planetary-scale bodysnatching, the corporate specifics of which I shan’t spoil here. The film exiles all this plot and context, preferring to play with the raw materials of the unknown. All we know is that this red-lipped temptress hunts through the dimly-lit streets, preying on young, working-class white males. After a quick seduction – who could resist her naive charms, the voluptuous promise of her contours? – she gets them into the passenger seat of her van, and transports them to her shadow-shrouded lair. And here begins the weirdest ritual of sexual congress, as she hypnotises her sex-thrilled victims into their demise. She leads them, literally erection-first, into a black pool of annihilation. It’s an extraordinary undoing of desire, as inexplicable as it is mesmeric, and it helps that Glazer manipulates darkness with a superb talent for arousing primal fears.
Part of the genius of the earlier stages of this film consists in how it tangles gender dynamics in intriguing ways. Johansson does not play a simple femme fatale exploiting her erotic capital to ensnare unsuspecting males. Instead, we have a portrait of an ambiguous consciousness inhabiting a mortal shell, uncomfortable with the powers of its own flesh and gradually growing familiar with the heft of human anatomy, the shifting possibilities of fingers and lips. Although she is the predatory figure, her victims still seem possessed of a patriarchal assurance that they are entitled to her. Later, as her experience of earth deepens, she begins to brush up against the daily agendas of the modern world: stilted friendships and awkward acts of intimacy. It is to its great credit that Under the Skin is as comfortable with conjuring moody episodes of horror as it is with elaborating a complex character study of existential unmooring and virgin ways of perceiving our all-too-human social landscape.
But the sacrifice of context threatens to render the film little more than a gorgeous game of elaborate metaphors. By the second act, things remain unexplained to the point of utter disorientation. And although the images persist in their stunning composition – a neon honeycomb collage of faces, autumnal forests quivering in ancient agonies – the unfathomable unknowns of the plot engulf the film in abstraction. The fiery curiosities so exquisitely ignited in the first half go unquenched. Still, from its slowly stylish opening to the unsettling ending, Under the Skin manages to triumph as a sci-fi thriller which pushes each element of the genre to its most eerie terminus. It may across as a spooky riddle, but the questions it leaves behind are powerful.