Sometimes the endless potential of strange fiction is a garden, rampant and fertile, and sometimes it is a featureless void, deprived even of convention’s drab landmarks. That you see either one or the other is down to the eye of the beholder as much as the nature of the material presented, which is why critical judgements can be dismissed as subjective and even biased opinion. Sometimes opacity and absence are intelligent devices and as welcome as any immediate, spectacular disclosure. And then there’s those times when any single thing you can think to say about a story is an egregious spoiler… which to me is something that elbows past discretion and burps into your ear about fatal insubstantiality.
I was so looking forward to Under The Skin that I was determined to ignore my own skeptisicm’s sardine breath and white knuckle it through any nagging preemptory suspicions.
Damn you, suspicion. You’re so often right. So spoiler alert; Scarlett Johansson is a nameless alien predator inhabiting a busty (is there any other kind?) earthgirl’s corpus. That shouldn’t ruin the film for you, unless I then blurted out that’s all, folks, and rolled credits. Which is what someone might as well have done twenty minutes into the thing because Under The Skin isn't really the piece of brilliantly-executed originality that I was sold, and this is obvious right from the stuttering opening sequence.
I was so looking forward to Under The Skin that I was determined to ignore my own skeptisicm’s sardine breath and white knuckle it through any nagging preemptory suspicions.
Damn you, suspicion. You’re so often right. So spoiler alert; Scarlett Johansson is a nameless alien predator inhabiting a busty (is there any other kind?) earthgirl’s corpus. That shouldn’t ruin the film for you, unless I then blurted out that’s all, folks, and rolled credits. Which is what someone might as well have done twenty minutes into the thing because Under The Skin isn't really the piece of brilliantly-executed originality that I was sold, and this is obvious right from the stuttering opening sequence.
What is an Alien Scarlett to do? She roams with a purpose, walking around on her hind legs, taking jerky notice of her new incarnation, finding all the onboard buttons. She is abetted in securing human meat for a devouring plasm by a number of silent companions, using the crude mechanics of desire to secure her victims and inviting us to contemplate the circular universality of predation, the ugly relativity of morality and the visitant experience.
All of which would be fine things indeed if Alien Scarlett could offer much to our scrutiny. I suppose she looks a bit wonky when wide-angled from below, and lipstick application is an arcane thing, but little is confessed or projected beyond Johansson’s terribly obvious surface. Her performance feels so rootless and under-directed that I fought the urge to feed the poor thing lines in the hope it would prod her out of wandering and pouting. And taking off her shit, jesus. That Under The Skin was penned and directed by dudes is a notion that intruded pretty quickly and the volume of lingering and tenuously-motivated nudity had even my male partner chuckling; yes, we get the whole tangled web of visual reference thing, but they just should have called it Here’s Some Tits so you Wont Admit it was Boring. That doesn’t put you off, does it? Sigh.
All of which would be fine things indeed if Alien Scarlett could offer much to our scrutiny. I suppose she looks a bit wonky when wide-angled from below, and lipstick application is an arcane thing, but little is confessed or projected beyond Johansson’s terribly obvious surface. Her performance feels so rootless and under-directed that I fought the urge to feed the poor thing lines in the hope it would prod her out of wandering and pouting. And taking off her shit, jesus. That Under The Skin was penned and directed by dudes is a notion that intruded pretty quickly and the volume of lingering and tenuously-motivated nudity had even my male partner chuckling; yes, we get the whole tangled web of visual reference thing, but they just should have called it Here’s Some Tits so you Wont Admit it was Boring. That doesn’t put you off, does it? Sigh.
It was boring, and for the worst reason- latitude. There was so much of it that everything seemed to droop and flatten out in all directions. A lot of that's on Johansson's performance, but let's pin this shit where it really belongs; Glazer should have gone with an unknown for the lead and spent the money nailing down some flapping edges, since there were plenty of them. For example- the massive challenge to tone posed by warty Scottish verité in the face of Johansson’s lacklustre otherness- an experiment that required much stronger oversight. The two performance styles just did not clash and spark like they should have, leaving the first looking just stupidly inept (whatever the truth around the local performances- there's that pesky skepticism again) and the second foolishly mannered. The predator’s obscurity could have been fine but there is peril in that sort of silence; it devolved into a dull second act and a denouement that had me A: discounting its literal probability right from the start and B: laughing out loud through a mouthful of popcorn and wondering exactly what it was that made black jellybeans so fucking delicious.
It could be argued that the nourishing of the plasm itself is worth the price of admission and it does provide the most satisfying sequences, hiving off in a cute, if wilfully arbitrary stylistic riff that infuses the strangeness of dream horror into the mundane choreography of physical congress, alluding uncomfortably to the relationship they’ve always enjoyed. But these scenes and indeed everything else of fleeting value stick out like dogs’ bollocks against an arc that flounders into sketchy production values, fumbled emphasis and patience-baiting repetition. And I could mutter something about Under The Skin’s best moments feeling... overly cribbed... but whether you consider such things knowing homage or cheap pastiche is best decided privately.
So yeah- not a dead loss, but a big disappointment. That the thing was shamelessly oversold in the midst of a weird-shit drought is not exculpatory and nor was it a contribution to our shared impression of generalised paucity and tediousness, and those are harsh words indeed from people with a lot of time for digression, rough edges and honest imperfections. That, and there is a wide stripe of insistent and quite icky cruelty in UTS that is neither explicitly motivated nor especially revelatory, leaving me with the need to wash my mental hands a few times afterwards and as there's no compelling reason to subject oneself to it, the sensitive and empathetic should probably consider themselves warned. If you’ve sipped Johansson’s Kool Aid you might enjoy her stilted antics, but she’s so much like McConaughey in her single-trick fuckery that I just couldn’t lie back and take it, especially in something so utterly dependant on finesse and transparency. She could have slapped us all with the delicious prismatic irony of her very presence in this thing- if she’d had the chops to testify on her own behalf. Apologists might ponder that, if nothing else. A lot of people seemed to love Under The Skin, because... I don't know... bewbs? I'm told they're popular.
So yeah- not a dead loss, but a big disappointment. That the thing was shamelessly oversold in the midst of a weird-shit drought is not exculpatory and nor was it a contribution to our shared impression of generalised paucity and tediousness, and those are harsh words indeed from people with a lot of time for digression, rough edges and honest imperfections. That, and there is a wide stripe of insistent and quite icky cruelty in UTS that is neither explicitly motivated nor especially revelatory, leaving me with the need to wash my mental hands a few times afterwards and as there's no compelling reason to subject oneself to it, the sensitive and empathetic should probably consider themselves warned. If you’ve sipped Johansson’s Kool Aid you might enjoy her stilted antics, but she’s so much like McConaughey in her single-trick fuckery that I just couldn’t lie back and take it, especially in something so utterly dependant on finesse and transparency. She could have slapped us all with the delicious prismatic irony of her very presence in this thing- if she’d had the chops to testify on her own behalf. Apologists might ponder that, if nothing else. A lot of people seemed to love Under The Skin, because... I don't know... bewbs? I'm told they're popular.
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