I'm not sure I have the words in which to describe the art house science fiction/horror film Under the Skin, but try I must for the film was a substantial experience for me.
Directed by the British Jonathan Glazer (of Sexy Beast fame), Under tracks the activities of an alien named Laura, played superbly by Scarlett Johansson, as she drives through the streets of a very working class Glasgow, picking up men in her van, taking them home and then consuming them, or devouring them sexually. The men are shown to sink into a dark pool on which Laura walks.
That's it, it's when we see Laura walk on water, we know she isn't human, i.e. not human in the sense we know humans to be.
Laura goes about the business of seduction in a disinterested way; she isn't titillated, or aroused; she is simply curious. While Laura prattles away a series of questions to her male victims, what's their name? Where are they headed? Where are they from? Are they single? the males, mostly un-literate, poor, into drugs and slightly thuggish, are mesmerised by her attention to them. These aren't men that attractive, London-accented young women would spare a first look at. The film seeks to jolt the sexual vanities of men out of their complacencies.
The prospect of having sex with Laura overrides the instinct for self-preservation, or benumbs the man to the fact that they are drowning in a nefarious cesspool while Laura, stripping herself off clothing, walks away from them. The men who drown are the proverbial donkeys who, lured by the shiny carrot of promise, would walk into their very deaths.
But one has to keep in mind that Laura isn't preying on the genteel; she's careful in her choice of slum dwellers. They won't be missed; their disappearance won't be an anomaly.
The film is also about Laura herself; Unlike other movie extraterrestrials, Laura looks remarkably like a human female and we are not given any distinct signs of her alienness. We, however, get ample evidence of her alienation from the sliver of earth in which she roams. The streets and the occasional club, the inside of a home, appear as they would to her eyes. They zip past us and remain mostly in a blur, the color of a day-old bruise on human skin. Means that nothing holds Laura's attention.
She picks up a disfigured man who is on his way to the grocery store at night; he interests her. The encounter proves to be transformative, for in the remaining part of the film Laura seems less alienated and more in a catatonic state of existence. She quits eating men; she tries to have real sexual intercourse with a kind male but runs away upon discovering that a crucial part of the female human anatomy, the genitalia, is missing from her nether regions.
The film ends on a most poignantly tragic of notes: a peeling off of Laura's skin reveals the dark slithery entity that she is under the human skin. She is set on fire and the last interlude is a depressingly violent one for Laura, yet it's the one time when Laura is seen to be riveted to something--the face of her temporary human body. As Laura holds up the face for viewing, she twitches with emotions that tell us that she has got attached to her skin.
I felt deeply sorry at the disintegration of Laura, into a pile of ashy substance.
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