Getting into Spooktober 2025 with Under the Skin feels a little like a cheat, because it’s more horror-adjacent science fiction than full-on horror. Definitely unsettling and memorable, but everything is presented so dispassionately that it doesn’t really seem horrific. Unless, I guess, you’re a rogue alien or a horny Scotsman.
The movie is so weird and often so cruel that I wish I’d gone in without knowing anything at all about the premise. It all still works very well, and the scenes inside the black void are still fantastic even though I’ve been seeing stills from the movie for years. But I did keep wondering how much more effective it all would’ve been had I not had any idea at all what was actually going on.
I’m an unabashed fan of Scarlett Johansson, and I think she was uniquely perfect for this role. Even though during the scenes where she’s driving around the city looking at men, I kept hearing “look at this one, look at that one, how about this one, how about that one?“ Partly because she’s one of the few actors of her pay grade that would’ve taken a part like this at that stage of her career — she always seems to choose parts that seem cool, while also choosing huge money-making blockbusters because she’s not stupid.
But more than that, the character has to go from charming and alluring to expressionless and completely inscrutable, often seamlessly within the same few seconds. I always get the sense from Johansson that she can put on the glamour and sex appeal just like any other costume, and take it off just as easily; it’s all drag, and she doesn’t take any of it particularly seriously, or as a crucial part of her identity or public persona.
And it might just be because I’m familiar with her movie appearances when she was much younger, but that aspect seemed to creep through here as well, to great effect. The bulk of the first half of the movie is her character using sex appeal to lure men to their doom, but there are several shots right afterwards where she drops the sexiness and just looks like a young woman again, trying to make sense of her own power and own identity.
Under the Skin is so effective in its first half because it’s so dispassionately opaque. It’s not immediately clear what exactly the purpose of it all is (unless you happen to have read any synopsis of the movie) or what motivates it. It wasn’t even clear to me whether the sequences in the black void were literal or symbolic.
There’s a sequence of people trying to save a drowning dog that’s particularly cruel because the movie doesn’t give any signal as to how you’re supposed to read it. It doesn’t seem manipulative, and it doesn’t even seem to be driven by rage; it’s just an inconvenient complication in the normal day-to-day business of our bizarre protagonist. The movie doesn’t explicitly define the relationship between the female and the male characters, or even say what the female character is, exactly. It never explicitly says “extraterrestrial,” but they’re both undeniably alien.
So the occasional flashes of human kindness and connection hit extra hard. In the middle of one of the most gruesome scenes, when we get an idea of what exactly happens to the men who’ve been lured into the void, there’s a moment when one of the men reaches out to the other and takes his hand. It’s difficult to tell whether he’s trying to help and is powerless to, or if he’s just trying to make a connection. And that’s what the camera focuses on, that brief moment of human connection.
Similarly, when the movie shifts, it starts to give us beautiful images of Scotland that make it look like an alien planet. Our protagonist is trying to find out exactly who and even what she is, and it feels like the human behavior that she’s been mimicking is completely alien to her as well. When she’s shown a rare level of kindness from the kind of man she used to seduce, she’s initially confused, then increasingly drawn to it, and then finally reminded that she can never be completely human.
The ending is bleak, but I really appreciated that it didn’t go in the direction that I’d been expecting. The strength of the movie is in its dispassionate ambiguity, so the arrival of her pursuer would’ve been predicable, and another act of kindness from a stranger would’ve been maudlin. I appreciated that the final shots were as close as the movie ever gets to conclusively answering questions about what our protagonist is, but was still ambiguous enough to invite you to make interpretations.
Which is why ultimately I’m not sure that I’d classify this as a horror movie. It does have quite a bit of imagery that’s horrific, which reminded me of more easily-classifiable horror movies like Nope, Get Out, and, yes, Lifeforce. But much of it felt like an understated celebration of mundane, chaotic, basic humanity. The idea that we have as much capacity for kindness as we do for being awful. It’s not what I’d call “uplifting,” but at least it suggests that we’re not all bad, and it’d be a shame if we got eaten.
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