by Daniel Santelli, Staff Writer

Form and content are harmonized and defamiliarized in Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s mesmerizingly bleak science-fiction trance that cops the premise of Species and extracts nearly every shred of mass appeal from it, constructing something that feels one or two degrees removed from an art installation. Revered and despised upon release, it’s an obsessively formalist endeavor that didn’t have a chance. No movie sets out to be a flop, even when the makers advocate vision over marketability. But despite trailing comparisons to the work of Stanley Kubrick, Under the Skin’s commercial failure was undeniably a foregone conclusion. 

A cherry-picked adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel, Glazer’s film takes the text’s core idea and select beats and fashions them into a $13 million art film that eschews exposition, ditches psychology, and fosters performances that render the frames’ occupants not so much characters as mere presences. In the novel, Isserley, a vulpine-like alien, is cosmetically redesigned to resemble a human and sent to Earth by a greedy corporation to harvest hitchhikers in Scotland to slake the elite’s cravings back home. In the film, she goes without a name and backstory. An embodiment of unheimlichkeit, Isserley has crafted the perfect mimic of human behavior without grasping the eponymous depths.

Isserley’s mission involves luring unsuspecting men to her lair with the promises of a sexual encounter, only to find themselves submerged in a pool of viscous fluid, awaiting an unspeakable horror to befall them. Upon release, many reviewers were quick to suggest the film was an attack on rape culture, while others argued its feminist aspirations were thwarted by the film’s tendency to objectify its lead star, Scarlett Johansson. Meanwhile, the hermeneutically inclined made much about its provocations concerning gender, sex, and what it means to be human. And indeed, there’s an accreting human core here as Isserley comes of age in the foreign body she occupies and gradually attains a curiosity about her programmatic nature and that of her quarry. What begins as a nearly avant-garde riff on genre veers into a relatively conventional but potent allegory about bodies, the human condition, and female identity.

Boil a work of art down to “what it’s about” and you occasionally risk depriving it of an essence that only the medium’s specific qualities can instill. It can also make something profound sound more than a little silly. Instead, consider the poetics at work and how they contextualize, deepen, and comment on the thematic inventory. The power of Under The Skin is mined from the power of the image and its tireless efforts to reify and mirror Isserley’s perspective through technique. Glazer intermittently deviates from Isserley’s perspective to impart (and reframe) the nature of female objectification, but almost everyone and everything here is partly objectified for the non-narrative first hour, a symptom of the impassive, alien eye of the camera as it regards the succession of repeated rituals in locales made foreign by the gaze. Coastlines are a harbinger of menace, a rave morphs into an ominous grotto of rouge and racket, and the streets of Glasgow take on an enigmatic aura undoubtedly buttressed by Mica Levi’s singular, discomfiting score. A Brakhagian montage of Glasgow nightlife expressed as a sensorial mélange of luster and motion constitutes the film’s most self-consciously accomplished flourish. If not for Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, Under the Skin might amount to this past decade’s definitive exercise in defamiliarization.

Opening with the formation of a human eye and closing with the sight of Isserley examining the body she’s occupied from outside, the interrogation of looking and perceiving are constant. Glazer toys with the cinematic apparatus through the preponderance of eye-line matches (and the occasional mismatch) in the first hour, even perverting their narrative function in one scene that sees the motorcyclist scrutinizing Isserley from all angles before achieving an eye-line match in one shot through superimposition. And there’s more toying where that came from. In a memorable homage to Antonioni, Isserley stands in the middle of a fogbound motorway whose silence is broken only by fluttering birds and distant echoes. Isserley looks offscreen, yet Glazer refuses to visualize what we hear, thus heightening the sense of offscreen space. It’s almost poetic (or maybe a bit on the nose) that the film Glazer references in this scene is titled Identification of a Woman.

If the final third departs from the abstract splendors of the first hour, it makes up for it with compelling tableaux of Isserley negotiating human desires and routines hitherto unexplored. Yet, the film persists in analogizing her with the violent elements of nature that surround Glasgow. Is the film essentializing her from humanity with this analogy? Is Isserley to be regarded as a force acting on humankind, not unlike the ocean that carries the family off to their doom in the opening passage? Is she ultimately unable to assimilate? Initially enkindled by pitying a man with neurofibromatosis, she achieves apperception by literally gazing at herself in a mirror, a moving appropriation of Isabelle Weingarten’s self-examination in Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer. The ending reaffirms the feminist aspiration in a negative context while the severity crescendos amid a mournful act of violation. As the camera tilts up to follow plumes of smoke, Isserley’s status is no longer that of a mirror. She has become one with nature.