Under the Skin

A strikingly radical, underground movie to creep into the mainstream, the third features from Jonathan Glazer (Birth; Zone of Interest) might have been called “The Woman Who Fell to Earth”. That woman is Scarlett Johansson, simultaneously deglamourized and highly sexualized. In a mesmerically choreographed series of incidents she picks up random men and leads them to their doom. It’s a dispassionate, alien-ated view of sexual attraction and human connection, and unlike anything you have seen before.

What on Earth, or off it, should we make of all this? Well, the film certainly forces us to think again about what’s really inside us – what makes us human, beyond blood, bones, nerves and meat. And there are muddy hints, in the changing responses of Johansson’s character to the people around her, that she is slowly taking on some of their qualities: empathy, cautiousness and a curiosity about the human body that runs beyond whether it’s best served fried or steamed. Or perhaps the film functions as a kind of pH test for humanness: as you feel the film needling away at your soul, you can at least be reassured that you probably have one to needle. There are, of course, no easy answers, although amid its scorching, fractured images, there is one certainty, brought into crisp focus. This is, very simply and straightforwardly, a masterpiece.

Robbie Collin, The Daily Telegraph

It sure as hell got under mine. Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi horror is loosely adapted, or atmospherically distilled, by Walter Campbell from the 2000 novel by Michel Faber. The result is visually stunning and deeply disturbing: very freaky, very scary and very erotic.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian