Jonathan Glazer
Under the Skin

What do we find beneath the skin?

Glazer's film travels slowly and inexorably beneath the surface through multiple sensory channels, into the depths of a dark matter that submerges and surpasses humanity and common irrationality.

The film's opening is the birth of a point of view, a spiraling expansion, forms gradually becoming clearer, storing information and words, ultimately revealing a defined pupil...

Alien communication occurs without words, through glances... the gradual awareness of an identity goes hand in hand with the approach of physical contact, the protagonist gradually bares herself not just in terms of clothing... beyond the highly successful stylistic choice of framing the surrounding reality and showing it as it is through the alien (in every sense) gaze of the protagonist, who for the first hour of the film manages to maintain a mono-expressive and truly "supernatural" demeanor (even more so than Clint Eastwood)... brushing real strangers' lives almost by chance with hidden cameras: on the sides of the road, on the emergency lane of a highway, leaving schools, at night walking through suburbs... blending all these moments with overlapping frames also sonically, exponentially increases the perceptual flow... the surface's seemingly alienating effect is gradually revealed over time, a visceral intimacy only vaguely anthropomorphic…

In her "job" of victim hunting, the girl's choice falls on characters living on the fringes, a kind of social "reject", methodical and repetitively estrangement, where giving attention is merely instrumental and devoid of any emotional involvement... gestures simply repeated, with in the background a multisensory chain of ever different perceptions... the image of Scarlett's unchanging and fixed alien human face reflected in the van's mirror as the road lights slide by is stunning... Yet a sort of "curiosity" seems to permeate the alien mind despite it being banal a dissociation with what "commonly" represents human "sociality" (e.g., when observing the attempted sea rescue, or when being dragged to the disco by a group of girls...). An innate sense of otherness that gradually brings something to the surface, like the precipitate of a chemical reaction poured onto latent subjectivity, from which the acoustic range acts as both soundtrack and perfect "interference" to the succession of visual development, the question to the foreign camper on the cliff trying to save other drowning strangers... foreigner, unknown, alien, all semantically close...

Beyond the sparse dialogues, the film's interest and emotional epicenter reside in the background and rather distant from the surface of the signified (above all else, the final image of the motorcyclist lost staring at a nebulous precipice), in this "alien" perspective, the emergence of an unease cannot be fully resolved in confrontation or identification with others... if the voyeurism characterizing the first part of the film appears somewhat random and instrumental, guided by the protagonist's viewpoint (who in turn guides the fatal van), subsequently we can perceive it as a gradual path, a slow awakening.... the first physical contact of the deformed boy with a woman, fundamentally coincides and leads to the alienated one's first true contact with herself (the moment she stops to stare in the mirror's darkness in her lair, only a few shadows of her face with poorly defined contours appear)... stopping and looking inside ourselves to see, feel or seek what?

The first consequence is a rejection that cracks the seriality and repetition of action, an apparently sudden but natural break, and precisely in the relationship with nature and the landscape that the film changes pace and scenery... in the second part from the city – from the suburban night to the countryside, to densely unpopulated places (a lake, a country road, a forest), a depth of field that widens with the use of sequence shots replacing the moving subjective visual of the protagonist... movements are framed from a distance, now it is the wandering of the girl that is spied on by the director, the anatomy of a landscape (the valley half-visible and half-obstructed by fog in which the protagonist moves silently and from which she emerges to return to a more conscious past) becomes a mark of an emotional journey necessary to support this metacognitive process…

The attention is focused on the self both physically: this time, the protagonist observes herself naked, clearly reflected in the mirror, and sex becomes more than a simple tool for satisfying a basic need but an experience aimed at self-discovery... both at an ultra-corporeal level seeking deeper contact with one's interiority within a veil of fog, as in the midst of a dense forest, open spaces become the very core of intimacy, metacognition, reflecting the journey of the foreign boy encountered on the beach in the first half of the film.

In summary, it's not a road movie, nor a sci-fi film… I would say a form of visual art perhaps less subliminally instinctive than a film like David Lynch's "Inland Empire" (a director Glazer surely knows well…) but more intrinsically sensory – perceptive.

In "Under the Skin" the seemingly sparse narrative conceals beneath its layer a dense substance, congested with sensory stimuli and viscerally devoted to the conflict between otherness and identity… ultimately, we are all both executioners and victims, we all want to be different but also feel part of something, the "problem" of being "other" or alien (from the Latin "alienus" with meanings of: "belonging to others, foreign; strange) seems intimately linked to that of "non-being", which ultimately triggers becoming, just as in Hegelian memory’s sense…

The film's ending visually alone would be worth the ticket price... The rating can only be high, with good peace for those who go to the cinema to be entertained or simply pass the time…

“I is another”, “nothing is nothing” (or perhaps everything)... and with all distractions placated, under the skin, find one's own blood...