Under The Skin (2014)

If watching movies is all about the "pleasures" they give you then you should at least be warned that the pleasures of Under The Skin aren't shared by any other movies that come to mind. If Hollywood has cracked the code of what audience's want - why the pleasures of "mainstream" movies seem to be the same to the point of painful boredom - then Under The Skin is in the much riskier business of searching out those unknown pleasures. What you could call the definition of a "film for film fans". Why I thought it was a great movie but wouldn't recommend it to anyone I know - this is one you have to find yourself.

The story isn't complex: a beautiful if not quite all there woman (played by Scarlett Johansen) drives around London, luring men back to remote locations that they don't seem to return from. I won't reveal anything else, because piecing things together is part of the movie (i.e. as much as it isn't part of most big Hollywood movies).

So what are the pleasures of this movie? It has a hypnotic quality - Mica Levi, who composed the music, gets the sound for this just right: a synth heavy score that sounds like a horror version of your favorite 80s sci-fi soundtrack; it just sounds like it could go on forever. There's so little dialogue; nothing gets explained; one image simply comes after the next and you make your own sense of it. If you find much story here then it's likely mostly stuff you applied yourself.

It's one of those movies that seems to very easily turn film fans into snobs (e.g. the first two paragraphs of this review) blasting people who didn't like it on how they didn't "get it" and should go back to Michael Bay movies. (Which irritates the shit out of me). You could so easily watch Under The Skin and not find any sense in it, which would make some of the longer sections - where the filmmakers hold the cameras for a long time on smaller, quieter moments - unbearable. If so, it simply wasn't for you.

There were bits that weren't for me either. The opening is drawn out; like the main focus of the filmmakers was making hard to understand. The visual light displays at the start of the movie weren't anything special (and pale in comparison to the fantastic, surreal images that come later). Sections involved real Londoners that didn't know they were being filmed, which was the film's main marketing gimmick, which is likely what made it feel underused in the movie. Yet if you do apply something to these images then there's great rewards here. Like looking into Johansen's performance as an imitation of a normal person, or the vileness of the final human character as compared to Johansen's character. Once again, I won't recommend; I'll just say I enjoyed it a lot.