I haven't seen a mindscrambler/sit-with-it-for-days type of movie in ages until I saw the new Jonathan Glazer film Under the Skin yesterday. Haunting, creepy, meditative, weird, hypnotizing.
I won't give away too much of the plot (what there is of one) but think of it as a modern re-imagining of the '70s cult film with David Bowie, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Instead of searching for water on Earth, like Bowie, Scarlett Johansson, the main character of the film, searches for...well, male flesh(?) I end with a question mark because you never really know what she is taking from these men she picks up in desolate urban and rural Scotland.
It seems to follow a horror bent, like a reverse slasher film, with the woman as predator but evolves into psychedelic sci-fi death traps.
The movie has so many echoes of other films but never apes anything too overtly. Ideas come from Blade Runner (non-humans replicated to look like humans who try to feel like humans), David Lynch dream logic a la Inland Empire or Mulholland Drive, a bit of Lars Von Trier's studies of a woman's suffering, the existential aimlessness of Lynne Ramsey's films like Morvern Callar, maybe Kubrick films too, like 2001. Most overtly, my mind kept going back to the weird late '70s/early '80s psychedelic sci-fi of the 2010 film Beyond the Black Rainbow.
Who knew ScarJo could come back from the brink of comic book/cheeseball action flicks? I was hoping that former indie darling could do it, and she did.
One of the best films of the year.
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