Under the Skin: When Humanity Looked Back at Itself
When Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin debuted in 2013, viewers were expecting a science fiction thriller with Scarlett Johansson. What they got was an experience unlike any other, one that transcended genres, language, and even conventional storytelling. It was not simply a film, but a haunting meditation on the meaning of humanity told through the eyes of an alien. The movie’s visual and auditory hypnosis in conjunction with the minimal and stripped down narrative to the point of nonexistence was a polarizing experience. A minimalistic approach to the narrative buried one of the most complex and daring cinematic creations to date. A film in which fiction and real life bled into one another at every turn and almost seamless at that.
A Woman Who Wasn’t Human — Until She Was
The story, loosely adapted from Michel Faber’s 2000 novel, follows an alien (Johansson) who walks the streets of Scotland, charming and luring lonely men and ultimately killing them. At first she is purely predatory — an observer and cataloger of disguises and the emotions of humans, detached and unfeeling. But as the film continues, something is transformed in her. She begins to absorb fragments of human experience — a smile, a touch, even a moment of pity — and in the end she is overwhelmed by empathy.
Glazer took a daring approach. Most of the exposition and dialogue in the novel was cut. He used only images and sounds. The balance was strange and familiar at the same time, as if we were observing a different creature trying to comprehend humanity.
Intense and minimal dialogue permitted Johansson to embody the film. The emotional arc she portrayed, from predator to participant, fully evolved throughout the film. The alien’s awakening was in large part due to Johansson’s stillness and intense focus which made her unacknowledged bewilderment profoundly palpable.
Scarlett Johansson: A Star in Disguise
Scarlett Johansson was, at the time, a global sex symbol. Glazer transformed this imagination when he made Under the Skin. He let her wander the streets of Glasgow in a shabby fur coat, black wig, minimal make up and a black wig and transformed her into a creature of the streets.
What’s most surprising is that many of the men she interacted with had no idea they were part of the movie. To capture authentic responses, Glazer and his team utilized concealed cameras. While staying in character, Scarlett Johansson drove a van and picked up unsuspecting locals along genuine Scottish streets, with some of these encounters eventually making the final cut of the film, contributing to its disturbing authenticity.
For Johansson, it wasn’t a part. It was absolute immersion. Afterward, she said the experience was both liberating and terrifying. “I was anonymous again. It was like living in a social experiment,” she explained. “You see how people really react to you when they don’t know who you are.
However, the process also exposed her to genuine psychological distress. As a lone female, she found herself in an alien environment, surrounded by strangers with no means of escape, and had to rely on her intuition. That emotional tension — as much as an actor and a human — was what drove the film.
A Director Obsessing Over the Absence of Sound
Jonathan Glazer is one of the few directors whose movie making is unconventional and scrupulous. Before Under the Skin, he had already made the visually rich and more accessible films, Sexy Beast and Birth. During this period, he wanted to do something more abstract, and, as he put it, to create a cinematic poem with the movie focused on perception and identity.
A lengthy period of 10 years was devoted to the making of the film. The initial drafts of the script underwent various changes and at one point it was the ordinary alien-sci-fi story about a family of aliens living on Earth. It was the lack of a narrative that made Glazer realize he wanted to completely discard it and wanted something more experiential.
Collaborating with cinematographer Daniel Landin, they were able to create a universe that was ordinary yet extraordinary. Most of the heavy lifting was completed by the rain-soaked and foggy landscapes of Scotland, while the interiors were crafted under the ‘black void’ using some CGI and smart lighting. It was both a joy to create and a wonder to behold the sequences where Johansson’s characters sink to the oil-abyss.
Mica Levi’s score produced an additional layer of discomfort through its ghostly, haunting quality. The use of distorted strings and electronic humming conveys the alien’s fragmented consciousness and makes the score almost a character in its own right.
Intermingling actors and unscripted real people suggested the documentary style of ‘Under the Skin’ and Hollywood. Many of the ‘targets’ were unscripted street people, who were approached right after the filmed ‘encounter’ and briefed about the recording and asked to sign a release.
The genre-defining style raised ethical questions about documentary making while the ‘real’ people. Should actors in a documentary-style film coerce unscripted street people without their consent? Glazer justified his artistic approach by stating that the goal of the first part of the film was to capture unsimulated real human emotion. The unsettling result of his documentary technique was to make the film paradoxically alive, unpredictable and disconcertingly real.
Fans, Festivals, and Divided Audiences
Reactions to Under the Skin at the 2013 Venice Film Festival were nothing if not polarized. Some audience members walked out, while others stood and applauded. Initially, the film received harsh criticism, but, in the aftermath, a cult following developed.
Fandom sparked analysis of the film. Mirrors were interpreted as a symbol of the “skin”- the mirrored and reflected image of the “other”. The crowd scenes focused on alien as a living organism. Some views saw the film as a feminist fable about objectification. Others focused on alienation.
In India, the film’s emotional core resonated with cinephiles and art-house lovers. The alien’s silent journey was a reflection of the pervasive urban isolation, of being “seen” but not “visible”. The film’s tone was a meditation on the existentialism that parallel Indian cinema, especially the works of Satyajit Ray and Mani Kaul, embraces. Ray’s characters embody lingering quietness and alienation while Kaul employs abstract storytelling.
The Impact of a Difficult Birth
Making Under the Skin was a painful and arduous process. The filming took place over the course of several years and was halted several times because of funding issues, script rewrites, and Glazer’s need for perfection. Even Scarlett Johansson admitted she was thinking of dropping the role several times because she felt she did not understand the character fully. “It was the most challenging thing I’ve ever done,” she said, and we believe her.
The film did, of course, gross a little over 7 million USD, which is decent for a low-budget art film, but the impact was and is far greater. It transformed science fiction, stopping genre filmmaking and opening the doors for atmosphere-driven narratives such as Annihilation and Arrival, which owe a mention to Glazer’s courageous abstraction.
Tremendous impact aside, Under the Skin is hailed as one of the best films of its decade, and for years has been sitting in the top 100 films list of this century according to the BBC. Johansson’s works and the decade’s best film made a turn for the better. The first and best turn was for her; it was a shedding of her Hollywood sheen. It has left her an introspective performer capable of true vulnerability.
The Humanity Beneath the Alien
The most haunting aspect of Under the Skin is that it isn’t really about an alien. It’s about us — about how empathy, once kindled, becomes a burden as well as a blessing. By the end, when Scarlett Johansson’s character gazes upon her own face — the “skin” she wears — she is no longer a predator. She is something different: painfully human.
In that transformation, we see the greatest truth of the film: that the most awful and most beautiful thing of all is to understand what it is to feel, to socialize, and to simply be, if only for a moment.
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