Under the Skin gives you plenty to chew on after its over, but the conversation it made me have with myself had nothing to do with plot. It left me trying to gauge just how much the viewer needs to know going in to this movie, or any other one. The Scottish film from Sexy Beast director Jonathan Glazer is slippery when wet, which is basically all the time, as it follows Scarlett Johansson as a woman on a strange mission in Glasgow. Calling to mind Malick and Kubrick, Under the Skin is withholding and beautifully abrasive, opening with a audio-visual creation of life that makes you feel like you’re taking an aptitude test.
The film is loud in its experimentation, but rarely feels the need to speak. Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum. Glazer does almost all the storytelling visually, and that alone makes this worthy of your time. See, I’ve got my reading on the events, and to my mind, the story is rather simple when you see through Glazer’s smoke and mirrors, but that doesn’t diminish the thought-provoking power of saying something simple in the most interesting way possible.
But I was able to piece together a challenging, engaging, and complete narrative because of a fact about the film’s plot I knew going in. My viewing companion for the Under the Skin did not have this piece of information, and arrived at a completely alternate read on the material. After we swapped notes, we agreed the narrative I had ginned up made more sense, but it’s got me thinking about just how much the viewer is responsible for knowing what they’re getting into.
Half the reason I feel like I spend so much time immersed in production news is so that I can properly identify new media that I’ll enjoy based on my interests. By learning about directors and the stories behind movies currently being made, you can walk into the theatre with some filters and shorthand for what you’re about to experience. Going into Under the Skin without knowing the key piece of information that’s never explicitly stated, only strongly hinted at, may well give you an entirely different experience than my own.
At a screening the other day, discussion of the trailer for film we were about to watch got some people in the audience jumpy about spoilers. It left me wondering if there ever can be a baseline level of audience awareness that a film needs to cater to, and if that’s maybe what causes a lot of the bigger ones to feel like so much time needs to be spent on setup and exposition. I get why people argue that a truly great piece of art functions regardless of whether or not you know what’s going to happen, but the author’s vision can demand unawareness from the audience for a given moment or idea to work. Where’s the baseline established for what the audience needs to know? In a trailer? A logline? The poster -hell, even the title?
Anyway, my point being: hey, Johansson’s character is an alien. Plenty of indication is given in the early parts of the film, but if you get caught off-guard by all the trippy visuals, you might end up tuning out the film when it’s trying to give you the facts without having to say them. I feel like the author’s intent would be for you to either know this information going in, or for you to arrive at that conclusion in the first 10 minutes. Now that you do have that tidbit, you can enjoy Under the Skin for all it’s worth, and really, it’s a lot. I dug the hell out of this, and figure that if the promise of naked Scarlet Johansson (just in the unsexiest context imaginable) is what it takes to get people to see it, then so be it.