Glazer: Under The Skin (2014)

Jonathan Glazer’s long-awaited third film is an adaptation of Michael Faber’s 2000 novel, Under The Skin, which revolves around an alien disguised as an alluring young woman who stalks the highways of exurban Scotland, preying on unsuspecting hitchhikers and wanderers. For the most part, though, Glazer takes a more minimal approach, simply following the alien, played by Scarlet Johannson, as she cruises her prey, whom she entraps in a series of hallucinatory sequences. Stylistically, the film alternates quite vertiginously between these meticulously composed segments and the cruising sequences which, while anchored and intercut with crystalline compositions, were mostly shot kamikaze-style, as a host of hidden cameras follow Johannson through a variety of fleeting encounters with men she picks up between streetlights, most of whom didn’t know they were being filmed. In the process, Glazer captures something truly cosmic about the proportions of outer suburbia and exurbia – distant pockets of light in the midst of crushing darkness – as well as evoking something inherently alien about the availability of every streetscape and vista on the global navigation systems that Johanssen seems to have internalised and perceptualised, to the point where it’s like watching a navigational device gradually realising it has become sentient. At least, Glazer shoots Edinburgh with a prescience that every single vantage point has already been captured, framed and processed by cameras that exceed any individual directorial agency, drifting the film into weird shots that don’t feel quite omniscient or point-of-view, somewhere between the perspectives of Google Street View and the windscreens of an automatic car. Perhaps that’s why the unstaged encounters aren’t as titillating as you might expect – there’s a sense these people have already been captured, somewhere in the back of another, earlier, automated image. Still, the film isn’t reconciled to that – the exurban vistas positively yearn to give themselves over to Glazer’s camera as if for the first time, even if that means removing themselves to the remoteness of the most distant cosmos, the remoteness of Johannson's exquisitely surreal prey-spaces, which seem to exist in some different dimension, devoid of space and time. And, as the blind spots in the film, the images that haven’t already been colonised by new cartographic media, they’re the closest we get to places that still feel as if they can be captured by Glazer's camera, placeholders for all the places that film can no longer hold.