By most accounts, Jonathan Glazer’s latest film, which attracted equal parts cheers and jeers at its world premiere overnight at the Venice Film Festival, is an unorthodox creature.
Featuring little in the way of a standard narrative, and apparently even less dialogue, it relies on evocative atmosphere, and starkly measured tones to tell its story, such as it is.
Based on Michael Faber’s 2001 book of the same name, it centres on a vampiric alien seductress played by Scarlett Johansson, whose sole means of interaction with humanity is luring bored, horny men into her web and dispatching them into pools of black, no doubt nourishing. liquid.
We are never really told who she is, where she is from, or even why she is on earth.
But then as Derek Malcolm of London Evening Standard explains that’s not really the point of the movie:
“The point of the film is not to see an alien at work among us but to see us from an alien’s point of view. And it works with very little in the way of a screenplay and even less obvious explanation … “
As he and others have described it is more about effect and mood than it is about telling a story in the traditional sense.
This has left me a little unnerved.
Fresh from the narrative-free hell that was Only God Forgives, I wonder if Under the Skin may simply be another example of style over substance, art triumphing over a coherent tale.
The intriguing teaser trailer, and rapturous reviews of the movie by the likes of The Guardian’s Xan Brooks give me pause however to at least consider that this may be that rare exception in the annals of arty film noir movies – a film of great poetic beauty that actually says something meaningful.
Under the Skin is also scheduled to be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September; no general release dates are available at this time.