Under The Skin

Known for his genre-defying films, music videos and adverts, Jonathan Glazer has always been a director of startling originality and divisive tastes. His latest feature, psychosexual sci-fi Under The Skin is likewise bound to leave audiences enraged or enraptured. Really, your response depends on how deeply you want to gaze into Glazer’s black, oil-slicked mirror.

Loosely based on Michel Faber’s novel, Glazer’s visually stunning film sees Scarlett Johansson play an almost wordless alien who steals the clothes of a lifeless young woman and roams Scotland, searching for lonely young men to seduce and subsume.

Her motives remain a mystery. Glazer does not believe in explanations. Instead he shows us the world through the alien’s point of view – a vision brilliantly achieved by filming many of Johansson’s outdoor scenes on the sly in Scottish towns. As Johansson casts her impenetrable, refrigerated gaze over humanity, so too does the audience, and the result is a disquieting portrait of ourselves as the alien beings. Through her eyes, our “mating” dances in crowded, UV-drenched nightclubs seem more grotesque than her intoxicating lair of glistening black floors, where she absorbs her victims into a smooth ocean of oil-like suspended animation.

Glazer’s visuals are intoxicating – from his other-worldly rooms rendered in pure light and darkness to the way he evokes the extraordinary and strange in everyday moments and landscapes. Mica Levi’s sublime, techno-string soundscape is tense and terrifying, conjuring the same sense of mounting dread as a Kubrick masterpiece. Those succumbing to the siren call of Under The Skin will feel its chill in their bones for a long, long time.

In cinemas March 14.)