Under the Skin: Alien Cinema at Its Coldest

Most alien films are anxious to explain the alien. They give you a homeworld, a motive, a plan, a face you can read. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin gives you almost none of that, and it is the coldest, most genuinely unearthly film in the modern science-fiction canon because of the withholding. A woman drives a white van through Glasgow. She stops men, asks directions, offers lifts. Some of them she takes home, into a black room where the floor is a liquid that swallows them. That is nearly the whole plot, and describing it does nothing to prepare you for the experience, which is one of the great feats of pure cinema this century.

What Glazer built

The film is loosely adapted from Michel Faber’s 2000 novel, and “loosely” is doing heavy lifting — Faber’s book has a fuller science-fiction apparatus and a satirical streak about the meat industry that Glazer strips almost entirely away. What survives is the central conceit: an alien wearing the body of a woman (Scarlett Johansson) preys on solitary men, harvesting them. Glazer spent close to a decade developing it, and the method he arrived at is the reason the film feels like nothing else. Much of the first hour was shot with hidden cameras rigged inside a van, Johansson in a dark wig genuinely approaching real members of the public in Glasgow who did not know they were in a film. Their unguarded reactions — the shy chat, the flattered disbelief, the ordinary Scottish men suddenly talking to a beautiful stranger — are real. When the film cuts from that documentary texture to the abstract black void of the harvest, the seam between the real and the impossible is where the dread lives.

Johansson’s performance is a study in subtraction. She is a global movie star deliberately playing a thing that is only pretending to be a person, and she calibrates the imitation with extraordinary precision — the smile that arrives a half-beat too late, the eyes that scan a face for data rather than warmth. The casting is itself part of the meaning. We are used to consuming Johansson as an image, an object of the camera’s desire; Glazer makes that consumption the subject, then slowly turns the point of view so that the predator we have been watching becomes something we watch differently.

Why it works: sound, and the black room

Two craft decisions carry the film. The first is Mica Levi’s score — her first for a feature, and one of the most important film scores of the century. It does not sound like music so much as an insect nervous system: sliding, detuned viola figures, rhythms that lurch and scrape, a seduction theme that is also a threat. Levi wrote the alien’s inner life as sound, and because Johansson’s face gives you so little, the score becomes the character’s interiority. When the music slides in, you are hearing the machinery behind the human mask.

The second is the black room itself, one of the simplest and most terrifying images in recent horror. There is no set — the men, lured by desire, walk toward the woman across a featureless void and sink without struggle into a liquid black floor while she strides ahead, untouched, undressing, drawing them deeper. Glazer refuses the biology. He does not show you the machinery of the harvest as a system with rules; he gives you an abstraction, a purely cinematic space that exists nowhere, and lets the absence of explanation do the work that a monster design never could. The one glimpse he does grant — of what happens to a body after it has gone under — is among the most quietly horrifying reveals I know, precisely because it is so restrained.

The direction is glacially patient, and the patience is the strategy. Glazer holds shots past the point of comfort. He lets the van drive in real time, lets silences run, lets a scene on a beach play out with a horror that is entirely about what the alien does not do. This is filmmaking that trusts the viewer to lean in, and it punishes the distracted watch — half your attention will get you nothing, because the film is built in glances, textures, and the slow accumulation of wrongness.

Daniel Landin’s cinematography deserves its own paragraph. The hidden-camera van footage is deliberately flat, grey, documentary, the ordinary Scotland of retail parks and drizzle and men in tracksuits — and Landin then cuts that texture against images of pure abstraction, the black void, a single point of light, a red interior that could be a womb or a wound. The film is constantly moving between two visual grammars, the surveillance-real and the interstellar-strange, and the friction between them is where the alienness is generated. One of the most quietly disturbing recurring images is simply the alien’s face reflected in the van’s mirror as she scans the pavement — a hunter’s blank appraisal shot in the visual language of a dashcam. Glazer makes the everyday itself feel predatory, so that by the end an ordinary Scottish beach or forest carries as much menace as any abstract void.

The turn nobody expects

For its first half Under the Skin is a horror film with a predator at the centre. Then it becomes something stranger and sadder: a film about the predator beginning to feel the pull of the body she is wearing. An encounter with a disfigured man — played by Adam Pearson, who lives with neurofibromatosis and whom the film treats as a person, with real tenderness — seems to crack something in her. She begins to experiment with being human: eating, looking at herself, fleeing her own role. And the film, which has been about a woman hunting men, tightens into a film about a woman alone in a country of men, increasingly vulnerable, increasingly hunted. The reversal is the argument. Glazer builds the whole first half so that the second can turn the camera’s predatory gaze back on the men, and on us.

This is where Under the Skin joins the shelf of films that use genre to look coldly at how bodies consume other bodies. It is the frozen descendant of Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which also weaponises the watching eye and treats desire as a trap that reprograms the one who feels it. It rhymes with Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession in its portrait of a woman becoming something inhuman while a hostile world closes in, and it belongs beside The Witch as a study of the female outsider whose strangeness the surrounding men can only read as a threat to be answered with violence.

The verdict: this is one of the essential films of its decade, a science-fiction horror that achieves genuine alienness by refusing to translate itself. It divides audiences hard, and the division is honest — it is slow, opaque, and withholding by design, and viewers who need motive and mechanism will find it maddening. That refusal is the value. A film about a being we cannot understand should not be easy to understand, and the discomfort of watching it is the closest cinema has come to the actual feeling of an intelligence that does not share ours. Watch it on the largest screen and in the deepest quiet you can manage; it is on the major streaming platforms and worth seeking in the best presentation you can find. Everything after this line spoils the ending.

Spoilers below

The last act completes the reversal with brutal economy. Having abandoned the hunt and fled into the Scottish Highlands, the alien tries to live as the woman she has been imitating. She takes shelter with a kind man; she attempts sex and discovers, in a moment of quiet horror, that the body she wears has no functioning interior — she is a surface with nothing human underneath, and the failure seems to frighten her more than any external threat has. The predator has become a person, and being a person turns out to mean vulnerability she has no equipment to survive.

The ending is bleak and pitiless. Alone in a forest, she is assaulted by a logger who pursues her, and in the struggle he tears at her — and her human skin literally splits and peels away, revealing the smooth black form beneath, the actual alien holding its own discarded human face in its hands and looking at it. Then the man returns with petrol and burns the creature alive. The last image is smoke rising into the cold Scottish sky, indistinguishable from the exhaust of any ordinary fire. The being that spent the film harvesting men is destroyed by a man for the oldest reason, because she would not be had. Glazer’s cruel, perfect symmetry is that the alien only becomes a victim once she starts trying to be human — the coldest possible verdict on what this world does to anything that wears a woman’s body and tries to want its own life.