dvd of the week
With Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer has made an indelible, hypnotic masterpiece of an art film.
In dark and rainy Scotland, a particularly vapid Scarlett Johansson drives a van around Edinburgh, stalking men. After she finds a man who is alone, she seduces and when he is completely naked (and often erect), a black gooey pool envelops him until he is gone. She puts her clothes back on and looks for another man. We assume she’s not human, but we don’t know what she is. We are never told why she is killing these men, how she is doing it, or why she expresses no emotion as the men (or any others) die. However, something does happen to her after she picks up a disfigured man with plans to send him, like the others, to the black goo. She seems to develop introspection, and this leads her deep into the Scottish countryside, her fellow maybe-aliens in pursuit. If all of this sounds rather odd, it is. The audience needs to do a lot of work to piece things together, and this is often the hallmark of what we call “art films.” Sometimes, I think, this abstraction becomes pretentious, but other times, like in Under the Skin, the abstraction is what makes the art.
