Under the Skin: Alien Cinema at Its Coldest

Sat, 23 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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.

Jonathan Glazer - vo.rs

Under the Skin: Alien Cinema at Its Coldest