Is Under The Skin The Most Overrated Movie Ever?

• Starring Her
• Directed by Jonathan Glazer
• Fear Factor: Premature naptime.
• Panderers and Seducers

Of the three arguments I’ve had the profound displeasure of repeating over and over again the last year with my newfound peers, the most persistent one has been over the proper function of film.  A lot of my friends are voracious consumers of Marvel products – I mean films –, and have labored to prevail upon me the notion that filmmaking’s primary purpose is just to entertain.  This is not an unpopular notion, nor is it exclusive to the Comic Book Guy community, as even unhip, stodgy, supposedly more critical Oscar voters have regularly seen fit to reward movies that do nothing but entertain them (Argo and The Imitation Meme).  If the movie inspires an emotional state of mind or engages them on an intellectual level, that’s a nice bonus, but most college kids and Basic moviegoers with the brains of college kids would be entirely content if every film played out like 21 Jump Street with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatyum – a nonstop stream of punchy one-liners, inverted stereotypes, hammy acting, and visual gags.

There’s nothing wrong with appreciating that series, which consistently delivers all the above things with exuberance and hilarity, but do movies of its ilk really perform the highest, noblest potential of the visual medium?  Jonathan Glazer’s infamously conceited arthouse experiment Under the Skin argues, “No,” emphatically.  While there are some truly magnificent Scottish landscapes and Glazer could have cast a less attractive lead, there’s not a moment in his film I found enjoyable to watch, and I was honestly staving off sleep through much of the middle.  Under the Skin is anti-entertainment, begging to be slowly digested and respected as art, whether or not you hate it while it’s playing.  I stepped away from it thinking I’d just watched 2001 on steroids, and that wasn’t really a good thing in my mind.  What the heck was I supposed to take away from this, and why did it take so long?

Then I read a little about the production process afterwards, and I realized that for all my initial indifference towards Under the Skin, it’s not a film that I or any other unaccomplished critic can beat up on in good conscience.  A documentary about the making of Under the Skin would probably be a more interesting project than the movie itself, which seems to rebel against all conventional rules of filmmaking.  From what I gather, major portions excluding the more stylized sci-fi scenes were shot without a script, a storyboard, or even real actors, and the editor was tasked with piecing together a legible, complete story from hundreds of hours of disassociated, mostly static footage; in this he largely succeeded.  It’s easy to complain about the protracted close-ups of Scarlett Johansson’s eyes, of Scarlett Johansson raising a fork to her lips, of Scarlett Johansson going for leisurely strolls in the forest, or of Scarlett Johansson perplexedly examining her human boobs in the mirror (OK, nobody complained about that part), but the truth is that very few people could have pulled together such a coherent narrative from so much random nonsense.  Nor would it have occurred to many to outfit a van with concealed cameras and record an ‘undercover’ Scarlett using her natural allure to pick up real Scottish dudes oblivious that they were appearing in a movie.  If I’d known beforehand what I know now about the creation of Under the Skin, I’d probably have taken a much greater interest in its proceedings.  Maybe that makes the whole movie a gimmick, but I have to give Glazer credit for its execution, especially when I’ve never directed and likely never could direct anything quite as ambitious and inventive as the pretentious monster that he’s birthed.

In one of the more fascinating scenes, Scarlett picks up a disfigured man (played by a real person without any makeup, unlike someone else) and tries to strike up a conversation with him as though he’s just another average homo sapiens.  Whether she does this because she’s learning how to show compassion or because she doesn’t perceive beauty the same way as we do remains unclear.  All the motivations and visuals are pretty unclear, for that matter, beginning with the slowly materializing neon circle patterns that will make you initially question whether you got a broken DVD.  The bottom line is that Under the Skin is not a film for those who demand clarity in everything they read or view.  Like its central character, it manages to be intermittently hypnotic, eerie, and unemotional, and some of the images – a faceless motorcycle driver racing down an empty lakeside highway with the camera close behind, a diminutive swimmer fighting brutal currents while Scarlett stares passively from the beach – are beautifully stark and bleak.

A sample of the strangeness that is Under the Skin.

As a sci-fi horror film, Under the Skin never crossed over from disorienting to genuinely disconcerting, and as science-fiction it was more concerned with the general idea of an alien visiting our world than with depicting the culture or behavior of an alien species.  I don’t think the movie has a message, per se, but if it has any underlying purpose, it’s to be as alienating a movie about human beings as one could possibly make.  This is also why it’s impossible to enjoy Under the Skin while one is watching it, because it’s shot from a perspective that we as viewers will always find distancing or incomprehensible.  The seemingly random and unfocused cinematography, curiously dwelling on the most ordinary of human public behavior, is probably meant more to bewilder than to bore us, enticing us to look at ourselves and our civilization through the eyes of an outsider.  How’s that for some artsy-fartsy bulls***?

So is Under the Skin the most overrated movie of all time?  Certainly not.  Yes, Johansson wears one blank expression for almost the whole film, yes, it could do without some of the extreme, 40-second close-ups, and yes, the scratchy, experimental soundtrack gets to sound really grating and repetitive, but the creators succeeded for the most part at making their purposefully boring arthouse picture really inhumanly boring.  I only insinuated it was the most overrated movie of all time to make you read the article.  The real most overrated movie of all time is Spirited Away.


This article was originally published at The Author's Files.