10 Years Later, Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Under the Skin’ Feels More Timely Than Ever [Retrospective]

Jonathan Glazer seemed like one of the more unlikely Oscar frontrunners for the 2023 awards season. Up until now with The Zone of Interest, an unorthodox drama following the commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss’s (Christian Friedel) home life living next to the concentration camp, his movies have followed the model of interpreting the pulp of genre film concepts through the lens of pensive arthouse features. His last film, Under the Skin, was released a decade ago to cult acclaim but no fanfare from major awards bodies. That film serves as a major key to understanding similar thematic preoccupations that carry through to Interest, but first, we need to talk about that speech.

After its Grand Prix win at Cannes and France opting not to select Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall as its Oscar submission, Interest proved to be the favorite in the International Feature category at the 96th edition of the Academy Awards. Glazer used his time wisely, speaking up about the genocide in Palestine. His statement was decidedly tactful and measured, making his point clear without veering into the incendiary fury the situation could otherwise justify. This was certainly well-discerning—there was a conspicuous lack of commentary from other winners despite many attendees performatively sporting red ceasefire pins, and Glazer was visibly shaking while delivering his statements. He knew no matter how diplomatic, this was an act of controversy. 

His prepared remarks were sound: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, rather look what we do now…Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” A common-sense statement that offers support for victims on either side of the conflict while underlining the real issue: the stalwart control and blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces. The blame is made clear, but the compassion is made universal. 

I don’t doubt Glazer knew the blowback he might receive for being willing to speak up, but the fallout from his relatively tame statements was still distressing to witness. Leagues of pro-Zionist cultural commentators took to the internet to deliberately misconstrue Glazer’s words, cutting off his quote to make it appear as if he simply said he refutes his Jewishness, as opposed to his actual meaning of his Jewishness being commandeered to fabricate a justification for violence against civilians. But prominent figures that gave the entire statement the time of day still took it upon themselves to condemn Glazer: Variety reported on an open letter circulating the industry denouncing his statements, signed by notable Hollywood creatives and executives such as Debra Messing, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Eli Roth, Amy Pascal, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. 

As expressed by Zoe Kazan on Twitter, it’s somewhat mind-boggling that anyone who actually watched and genuinely reckoned with the ideas put forth in The Zone of Interest would be surprised by Glazer’s statements. Though the “banality of evil” takeaway that many viewers expressed isn’t inaccurate, the film acts much more acutely as a stark mirror in which to recognize our own complicity in the face of that violent evil. Glazer is asking us to reconcile how closely our disregard of worldwide atrocities can be associated with the clinical perspective of hum-drum Nazi home life and the tedious, bureaucratic nature of monstrousness as he depicts it. His case is thus: we are all removed from the violence that engenders the way we live. Though bleak, Glazer is interrogating our base facets of humanity and, I believe, prompting us to envision a world where we can be better than this.

To that end, The Zone of Interest is not the first film Glazer has made that contends with the building blocks of compassion and empathy that make up a worthwhile idea of the human experience. The aforementioned Under The Skin, his sci-fi masterpiece, deals with similar notions of the importance of human connection and fellowship amid inhumanity. That inhumanity is made literal here: Scarlett Johansson plays an alien seductress cruising the streets of Glasgow, beguiling men to follow her back to her lair, an empty void where she traps her victims and, in some of the most disquieting sci-fi-horror imagery ever put to screen, seemingly pops their bodies to harvest their meat, while their membrane of skin is left floating in the abyss. It’s quite a different film than Interest, but really only in content—the tone and thematics of each almost make them feel like sister films, both disconcerting and droning stories about what it means to be alive.

In case you believe this sounds like a bit of a stretch, I should note a line from the film’s synopsis on the back of the Blu-Ray: “Under The Skin is about seeing ourselves through alien eyes.” The two films together reveal a preoccupation Glazer carries with putting humanity under a microscope and attempting to deduce the breadth of our goodness and the limits of our barbarity, or maybe the other way around. Johansson’s alien enters the picture as an objective operative but gradually begins to understand the complexity of humanity. 

It is, of course, crafted with Glazer’s relentlessly bold and singular vision of cinematic craft. In adapting Michel Faber’s novel of the same name, he creates an unsettling, sometimes avant-garde folk tale of a genre film with some of the most distinct sci-fi image-making since 2001: A Space Odyssey. Just look at how he conceives the creation of Johansson’s character in the first few minutes: the slow motion of interlocking monolithic shapes, coming together in some sort of uneasy, inevitable harmony to form an eye. The unsettling hum of Mica Levi’s score plays under Johansson repeating sounds of the English language, preparing to integrate herself within our world. The entire film reverberates with this sequence’s inescapable foreboding. The alien’s handler brings her an incapacitated, kidnapped woman in order to utilize her clothes to blend in. She observes a stray ant on the woman’s body: the two creatures hold no separate distinction in the way Johansson’s character sees them—trivial, small beings. 

She then takes to the streets of Scotland. The film depicts her hunt through hidden camera methods (which Glazer would go on to emulate once again with Interest), stealthily following Johansson around a shopping mall and driving around the city as she pulls over unsuspecting (mostly real, non-actor) men that she attempts to ensnare. Cold and unfeeling, she leverages elements of their human nature that are easy to manipulate—kindness, sexual desire, compassion. At one point, she witnesses an act of bravery when a local man attempts to save a couple from drowning in the ocean, who she bludgeons and captures after he returns to shore having failed to do so, leaving the couple’s now-orphaned baby wailing on the beach. She lacks any basic sense of kindness. If she were human, we would call her a sociopath. 

Throughout her exploits, a series of events threatens to upend her callous nature, moments that seem trivial on their own but compound into a recognition of humanity. These include a group of girls who induct her into their group at the club, the stem of a rose that pricks her finger causing her to bleed, and passersby who help her off the ground after she trips and falls. A montage seems to imply that the sheer amount of everyday moments and small instances of grace experienced by humans is almost too much for her to bear. But the real catalyst for Johansson’s shift is the character known as The Deformed Man played by Adam Pearson, an actor who suffers from severe facial deformities as a result of neurofibromatosis. Per her routine, she gives him a ride back to her lair and learns that he hasn’t been with a woman in a very long time, while perfectly disregarding his appearance. He’s just another human. 

After she traps him in the void, she catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror: flawlessly disguised as human, and yet she feels a kinship with The Deformed Man’s alienation. Something like this is in danger of having a disfigured man come off purely as a simple plot device, and maybe in some ways this is still true, but the effect of his presence and how they change Johansson’s character pay large dividends in making this a movie about the invaluable notion of human empathy. 

From here on, she tries to experience life as a human—at the outrage of her handler who attempts to track her down—always to unavoidable failure. She tries a piece of chocolate cake at a restaurant and immediately spits it out, as if her body would be unable to digest it. She tries to become intimate with a man before realizing she doesn’t have the proper parts to actually have sex with him. She observes her naked form in the mirror, suddenly filled with a curiosity of humanity, now unable to reconcile the fact that she is quite literally not human. What’s more is that she now becomes the hunted, as she’s attacked by a trucker that attempts to rape her while sleeping in a shelter on a remote hiking trail. She becomes subject to the terrible truth, which is that humanity is prone to the same forms of evil that she and those she works for had arrived on Earth to inflict. She isn’t given enough time to realize that it’s up to us as individuals to take a stand against such wrongdoing, to forge a path toward decency. 

She’s chased through the woods getting pinned down by the man ripping off her clothes, accidentally tearing off her artificial skin in the process. The being removes its disguise and exists in its true form as the trucker runs off before returning to douse her in gasoline and set her ablaze, her ashes spreading throughout the air. Despite his chase, her handler wasn’t even able to catch up and reprimand her before she was lost to the brutality of humans. The film’s call for collective humanity is big-hearted but tempered by its detached disposition and final moments serving as a reminder that savagery will always live among us. 

Apart from being a superbly crafted piece of arthouse sci-fi, one that challenges the traditional notions and methods of narrative and character development, Under the Skin is a film that exists directly alongside The Zone of Interest, the two films interrogating the perpetual impulses of violence that exist in human nature. Though one is about a murderous alien newly arrived on Earth and the other about the dull life of domesticity afforded to the commandant of Auschwitz, each speaks to ideas of the perennial existence of depravity within our world and how we owe it to ourselves to reflect on how we perpetuate it. Anyone who saw The Zone of Interest shouldn’t have been shocked by Glazer’s Oscars speech, but neither should anyone who saw Under the Skin, a film that perfectly speaks to the filmmaker’s clear sense of compassion.

A24 released Under the Skin on April 18, 2014. It is currently available to stream on Max and rent on Prime Video.

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Trace Sauveur

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