Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is a transformative science fiction masterpiece that prioritizes sensory experience over traditional narrative. Starring Scarlett Johansson as an unnamed extraterrestrial in Glasgow, the film explores the "alien" nature of the human condition through a stark, audiovisual language that relies on minimal dialogue and high-concept imagery. A Study of Humanity and Alienation
The film follows an alien predator who assumes the form of a seductive human woman to lure men into a surreal black void where they are harvested. However, the core of the film is her gradual "awakening" to human emotion—triggered by moments of vulnerability, such as her encounter with a man with facial disfigurements (played by Adam Pearson) and witnessing a tragedy on a beach. Empathy as a Human Marker
: Her transformation begins when she starts to recognize herself as a "subject among subjects," moving from a programmed hunter to a being capable of curiosity and mercy. The Fragility of the Body
: The film’s title refers to both the alien's literal disguise and the deeper, intangible qualities—like kindness and pain—that define humanity. Cinematic Techniques and Realism
Glazer utilized unique filming methods to ground the sci-fi premise in a gritty, "witnessed" reality.
Introduction
Released in 2013, Jonathan Glazer's film "Under the Skin" is a cinematic masterpiece that has sparked intense debate and discussion among audiences and critics alike. Starring Scarlett Johansson as an alien seductress, the film is a thought-provoking exploration of human relationships, identity, and the complexities of the human condition. This essay will argue that "Under the Skin" is a film that not only pushes the boundaries of cinematic storytelling but also challenges its viewers to rethink their assumptions about what it means to be human.
Challenging Traditional Narrative Structures
One of the most striking aspects of "Under the Skin" is its non-traditional narrative structure. The film's plot is deceptively simple: an alien, disguised as a human woman, seduces men on the roads of Scotland, only to drain their life force and discard their bodies. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Glazer's film is not just a sci-fi thriller but a deeply philosophical exploration of human relationships. The film's use of long takes, static shots, and a minimalist score creates a dreamlike atmosphere that blurs the lines between reality and fantasy.
The Performer and the Performance
Scarlett Johansson's performance as the alien seductress is a key element of the film's success. Her portrayal of the character is both captivating and unsettling, as she navigates a complex web of emotions and desires. The film's use of close-ups and point-of-view shots puts the viewer in the shoes of the alien, creating a sense of intimacy and immediacy. At the same time, Johansson's performance raises questions about the nature of identity and performance. Is the alien a convincing imitation of a human, or is she simply a performer playing a role?
Human Relationships and Vulnerability
Through the alien's encounters with men on the road, the film explores the complexities of human relationships and vulnerability. The men she meets are often desperate and lonely, seeking connection and intimacy in a world that seems devoid of it. The alien's interactions with them are both seductive and predatory, highlighting the power dynamics at play in human relationships. At the same time, the film suggests that vulnerability is a fundamental aspect of the human condition, one that is both necessary and terrifying.
The Gaze and the Objectification of Women
The film's use of the gaze is also noteworthy, particularly in its portrayal of the male gaze and the objectification of women. The alien's body is often framed and shot in a way that highlights her objectification, emphasizing the ways in which women are reduced to their physical appearance. At the same time, the film critiques the male gaze, suggesting that it is a form of control and domination. The alien's power to manipulate and seduce men is also a commentary on the ways in which women are often expected to perform and conform to societal expectations.
Conclusion
In conclusion, "Under the Skin" is a film that pushes the boundaries of cinematic storytelling and challenges its viewers to rethink their assumptions about what it means to be human. Through its exploration of human relationships, identity, and vulnerability, the film offers a profound and unsettling commentary on the human condition. With its innovative narrative structure, captivating performances, and thought-provoking themes, "Under the Skin" is a film that will continue to resonate with audiences for years to come. Ultimately, it is a film that proves that cinema can be a powerful tool for exploring the complexities of human experience and challenging our assumptions about the world around us.
To get the most out of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin , it helps to understand that the film is a radical departure from its source material, focusing on a sensory "alien's eye view" of humanity rather than a traditional narrative.
The following articles and resources provide deep dives into its themes, production, and why it is considered a modern masterpiece: 1. The Making of a Masterpiece
To appreciate why the film "works," it's essential to understand its unique production. Scarlett Johansson actually drove a van around Scotland in disguise, picking up real hitchhikers who didn't know they were being filmed.
The Guardian offers a definitive interview with Jonathan Glazer about the ten-year journey to make the film.
IndieWire explains the hidden camera techniques used to capture "authentic" human reactions. 2. Deep Thematic Analysis
The film is often viewed through the lens of gender, identity, and the "female gaze."
The Atlantic explores how the film redefines the sci-fi genre by making the familiar human world look terrifyingly foreign.
The New Yorker provides a sophisticated look at Scarlett Johansson’s performance and how it strips away her "movie star" persona to create something truly unsettling. 3. Comparison: Book vs. Movie
If you find the movie confusing, reading about Michel Faber’s original novel can provide "logical" context that the film intentionally omits (like why the men are being harvested).
Literary Hub discusses the drastic differences between the book and film, explaining why the film chose abstraction over the book's satire. 4. Visual and Audio Breakdown
The movie’s impact relies heavily on its haunting score and minimalist visuals.
Pitchfork has an excellent feature on Mica Levi’s score, which is central to the film’s atmosphere of dread. under the skin film better
Here’s a developed text on why Under the Skin (2013, dir. Jonathan Glazer) is not just a good film, but a better film than most science fiction—and arguably a masterpiece of the 21st century.
He learned patience by watching the road.
It began with the van—an old, white thing with a dented passenger door and a medicinal smell that never left. He had seen it around the edges of town for months, a ghost that collected late-night bottles and left without looking back. People said the driver had no eyes; they meant it as a joke. He meant it as instruction.
Every night, after the factories coughed and the neon over the diner dimmed, he walked the same route, past the laundromat that hummed like an insect and the park where the pigeons slept on the rusted carousel. He never hurried. He moved so slowly that the streetlights decided where his shadow fell. If something wanted him—if something really wanted him—someone would have to follow the patience he practiced.
The first time he saw her properly she stood under the flicker of a bus stop sign like a thing in the negative of a photograph, not quite belonging to the light. She wore a coat that had once been beautiful and now kept its secrets warm: a dark place, lined in a red he did not trust. Her hair was the kind that looked wet even when it wasn’t, threaded to disappear behind her ears. She watched the van with an interest that was not ordinary, something like a fox cataloguing a henhouse.
He watched both of them.
People in town used the word better like a charm. Better meant longer shifts, better meant not waking with your mouth full of frost, better meant the proprietor at the pawnshop offering you three dollars more than the price of shame. He had folded the word into his life like the last crumpled leaf of a calendar; he believed it could be bargained with. The van was better. The woman was better. They had polish—soft surfaces that reflected him as a question.
On a Tuesday that smelled of spilled coffee and new rain, the van stopped beside the bus stop. The engines and the night had their conversation, a low, private exchange. The woman stepped inside the sliding door as if into a warm room and turned. Her face was not an absence; it was an instruction. She smiled the way a machine does at a coin.
He kept walking until the rain asked twice and he finally gave in. He followed at a distance so respectful it might have been reverence. The van rolled through neighborhoods that had given up on paint, past houses where curtains were knots. Traffic lights disciplined themselves for an audience of none. At the edge of town the van slowed and stopped at a house that had once served as a church. The cross had been replaced with an antenna; pigeons were the new congregation.
When the woman stepped out she walked like she had rehearsed sorrow. She moved with small, perfectly calculated hesitations that left room for doubt. He stepped closer.
"You shouldn't follow people," she said, voice thin as paper.
"You shouldn't get in strange vans," he answered, real honesty flattening his chest. "But you did."
She laughed—soft, like someone converting the joke into currency. "I am better," she said. The words fell like coins into a still fountain.
He had thought better meant small mercies. She said it tasted like far-off music. "What makes you better?"
She watched the antenna tilt toward the moon and for a second she looked like a woman who could remember knitting blankets. "I fix people," she said. "I take the rust away."
"Fix how?"
She opened her coat enough for him to see something that wasn't a face but a kind of suggestion: skin that blurred at the edges, smooth like polished river stones, the dark red that had once been modest now an advertisement. "There are places where people feel sharp," she said. "Maybe a life ran into them wrong or someone else made a cut. I smooth the cut. I give—" she searched for a word and chose it, "—continuity."
He thought of his hands: small, vigilant, knuckled in by years of fixing pipes for people who did not know their own names. Continuity sounded like an eraser. It sounded like surrender.
"Why would anyone want that?"
"To stop bleeding. To stop remembering," she said. "To be less—" she waved a slim hand, "—less of themselves and more of everything else. Better."
He remembered the van’s medicinal smell and the way the driver seemed not to blink. He remembered the rumor that people who left town after midnight did not carry a past. The woman watched him as if testing a seam.
"You fix people for money?" he asked.
She seemed to take shock and stain it into curiosity. "I fix what needs fixing. Money, stories, mistakes. The price is the same."
He was not brave. He was a man who had learned to be small so that larger things might not notice. Still, he wanted to know whether the fixing made people whole or merely the right size for the world. "Does it work?"
She tilted her head. "It depends on the person. Some people are paper—foldable, predictable. When I smooth them, they become less likely to tear. Some people are glass: beautiful, brittle. I can change the surface, but the way they break stays."
"Have you done me?" His question surprised him with its directness.
She studied his knuckles and the scar that ran like a short highway across his thumb. "Not yet. You have patience like a cathedral," she said. "But patience can also be a seat for sorrow."
Sorrow. He could feel it—old as chipped enamel, warmed by years. The world had taught him to fold away what hurt. He wanted to ask her to take it; instead he asked the thing that mattered. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is a
"If you make me better, what do I lose?"
She answered with a truth that could be a threat. "You would lose the places that remember. You would no longer carry the maps of your mistakes. You would be lighter—easier to carry. People would like you more. They would not stand so close."
He thought of the laundromat where a woman had once dropped a photograph and never returned it, of the park where a girl had been kind to him once and then been taken away by other demands. He thought of how the world touched him and moved on, leaving a bruise that told him he was alive.
"How long does it last?" he asked.
"For a while. Probably longer than you expect. If you want permanence you must be willing to pay a cost no one in town has yet afforded."
"What's that?"
"The things that make you remember—your mistakes, your grief—are anchors. Toss them and the ship floats. But floating has a price."
He pictured his hands as a lost language: calluses shaped into phrases he used to ask for food, fingers that could read the difference between a broken valve and simple rust. If those fingers forgot, would the things they had fixed come undone? Would his small acts of repair, the unseen kindnesses, slip like a white-hot coin into a furnace?
"What do you accept?" he asked finally. He had come this far; the rain had decided his fate.
"Sometimes I ask for an object. Sometimes I ask for a memory to be traded. Sometimes—" She paused. "Sometimes I take nothing and leave a piece of me behind."
He considered the coin of memory versus the casualness of being liked. The town had taught him to think small; she taught him that being small could be a shield or a chain. He found himself bargaining, not with money but with a question of proportion.
"I'll trade one memory," he said. "Only one. The rest is mine."
She smiled the way a machine gives permission. "Make your choice."
He thought of choices like forks in the road: they took you somewhere and told the future to prepare. He could trade the night at the factory when the pipes had burst and he'd watched a boy drown in panic as colleagues scrambled with buckets, hands useless in the dark. He could trade the time the woman at the laundromat had left with his photograph clutched and never explained. He could trade the day his father had left the house and the word goodbye had never landed.
Instead he found himself choosing something smaller, as though economy might buy him back everything else. He chose the memory of the pigeon with a broken wing he had fed once and then lost. It was small, almost unworthy, a thing like a coin found in a gutter. But it held in miniature the geometry of his compassion: how he bent toward smallness and held it like a map.
She closed her eyes to accept it and in the closing the room seemed to inhale.
When she opened them the scar on his thumb had smoothed. The small highway of cartilage filled like a riverbed in rain. He put his hand to the place and felt the wrongness of healing. It was a subtle theft: a history that once taught him to coax a limp back into rhythm was now a quiet void, a shelf missing a book. He felt lighter, cleaner. He noticed, with a small stab, that the laundry woman's laughter no longer had the sharpness it once did; he could not remember exactly where he had seen the photograph.
"Better?" she asked.
He could see it in her face: the anticipation of an experiment that had succeeded. "Better," he echoed, and the word landed on him as if to test whether the syllable fit.
The van took them back through town. The driver never spoke. The houses slept in their tidy disregard. He thought about the idea of being liked more—how it might open doors, how it might close others. He thought of the man who would be friendly, who would keep less of himself behind a folded sleeve. He thought of the girl at the park who might smile and not be torn away by the jagged edges of his past because there would be fewer edges.
At the corner, the van stopped. The woman turned to him again. "You can come with me tonight," she offered. "I have work to do. I could fix more."
He almost said yes. The warmth of the van called to a man who had spent his nights alone with the mechanics of pipes and grief. But he thought of his hands and the small things they had made steady. He thought of the pigeon and the weight of a single bird's life he had chosen to forget.
"No," he said. "I like my corners."
She considered him like an unfinished instrument. "Better hurts sometimes," she said. "But it makes you easier to carry."
He nodded. "Then carry me lighter," he said, and meant that he would rather move through the town with his remembered fractures than be a smooth thing people preferred without knowing why.
She reached into her coat and left on his palm a small flake of something that could have been paint or a promise. "For when you find it too heavy," she said.
He kept it like a secret and walked home. The van and the church with the antenna became a rumor he could not quite smooth away. Days passed and the town continued its unhurried decay. People liked him a little more; the proprietor at the pawnshop offered two dollars extra when he gathered bottles. He noticed the trade-offs as one notices a scar: sometimes tenderness had dulled; sometimes conversation walked lighter, skimming where it once dug.
Weeks later, he stood at the laundromat and watched a small boy drop a picture. He bent, scooped it up, and handed it back. The boy thanked him in a voice that smelled like summer. He felt the memory of the pigeon like a missing tooth—an absence that made his speech different but not less whole. He smiled with less ache and more ease. The world cupped him and moved on. Short story: Better He learned patience by watching
Once, in the middle of a night he spent awake with pipes that needed tightening, he found the flake the woman had left in his palm. It vibrated between his fingers like a quiet key. For a moment he imagined getting back in the van, letting the woman smooth all the corners into an absence so complete it would shine in the dark like a coin.
Then he tightened the wrench. The pipe gave. Water found its course like a healed note. He swept the floor and when he went out the next morning the street felt the same and not the same. He had chosen continuity with the small thing that was broken and kept it as his proof.
Better had not been a single thing after all. It was a ledger: gains in one column, loses in another, a balance sheet that only showed up when you counted what mattered. He had traded a memory for ease. He had traded sharpness for company. He had kept the rest.
Sometimes, when the moon remembered to be full, the van would pass at the edge of town. Sometimes he would see the woman in its window, her coat a place where light bent. He would think of the pigeon and the way he had decided that being slightly less might be worth learning to open his hands. He would think of patience and how it could be a cathedral or a cell.
And when children asked what made someone better, he would say nothing and then tell them, in a voice that had learned to hold things, about the small, stubborn kindness of keeping a single scar. They would fidget and look away and then, in the quiet between questions, he would pass them the flake the woman had left. It was dull and warm and meant nothing and everything: a little proof that being better is a choice, not only a gift.
Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is widely considered a modern masterpiece of science fiction, though it remains one of the most polarizing films of the last decade.
It is "better" than your average sci-fi because it replaces heavy dialogue and CGI with haunting, practical imagery and a deeply internal performance by Scarlett Johansson Why it stands out Visual Storytelling:
The film relies on "sensory" experiences rather than a traditional script. Much of it was filmed using hidden cameras on the streets of Scotland, capturing real, unscripted reactions from people interacting with Johansson’s character. A True Alien Perspective:
Unlike films that anthropomorphize aliens, this movie makes the protagonist feel truly "other." You witness her evolving from a cold predator to someone developing a tragic, fragile sense of self. Haunting Score:
Mica Levi’s discordant, screeching soundtrack is essential, creating a constant sense of dread and alienation that stays with you long after the credits. Critical & Audience Reception
The film's "goodness" often depends on what you value in a movie: The "Pro" View: Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
praise it as an "absorbing" and "haunting" experience, often ranking it among the best films of the 21st century. The "Con" View: Its abstract nature can be frustrating. At its Venice Film Festival premiere
, it was actually booed by some audience members who found it too slow or perplexing. The Source Material: If the movie feels too vague, the original novel by Michel Faber
provides much more explicit detail about the aliens' motives and the "meat processing" plot. Under the Skin
is better if you want a film that feels like a fever dream or a piece of gallery art. If you prefer clear plot resolutions and fast-paced action, it might feel inaccessible. , or would you like similar surreal sci-fi recommendations
To write a successful paper about Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), you need to move beyond a standard movie review. This film is deliberately ambiguous, meaning your paper should focus on interpretation, visual analysis, and thematic meaning.
Here is a guide on how to make your paper "better," including potential thesis statements, key themes to explore, and advice on how to analyze the film's unique language.
A weak paper summarizes the plot. A strong paper argues a specific point. Here are three distinct angles you could take:
Option A: The Evolution of Humanity (The "Becoming" Narrative)
Option B: The "Male Gaze" Reversed
Option C: The Sublime and The Abject (Horror Analysis)
You cannot write a good paper on this film without mentioning Mica Levi’s score. It is a character in itself.
Most film scores use melody to guide emotion. Mica Levi’s score for Under the Skin uses discordance, microtones, and scraping cellos. The main theme is a single, vibrating, nauseating pitch that sounds like a bow drawn across a rusty saw.
Why this is better: The score does not accompany the horror; it is the horror. It bleeds into the sound design. The alien’s theme is not meant to be enjoyed; it is meant to be felt in the sternum. When the music swells as a man sinks into the void, it feels less like a composition and more like a biological reaction. You are not listening to Under the Skin; you are surviving it.
Most science fiction films are terrified of silence. Think of any Hollywood alien movie: within the first twenty minutes, a scientist will stand in front of a whiteboard and explain the alien’s weakness, or a general will bark exposition about “harvesting human fluids.”
Under the Skin commits the ultimate cinematic sin: it refuses to explain itself.
We never learn the alien’s name, her planet of origin, or her mission statement. We are thrown into a void of blackness, the birth of a pupil, the assembly of a human disguise. There is no voiceover. No subtitled alien language. No helpful sidekick.
Why this is better: By denying us exposition, Glazer forces us into a state of pure observation. We learn alongside the alien. We see her clumsy attempts to mimic human speech (“I’m not from... here...”). We watch her learn to dress, to walk, to smile. The lack of dialogue transforms the film into a sensory experience rather than an intellectual puzzle. It trusts the audience to assemble the horror themselves, which is infinitely more powerful than being told.
The film’s most iconic visual is the “black room”: a featureless, liquid void where the alien’s victims sink into a surreal, membranous abyss. Glazer eschews CGI gore for practical, abstract horror. The victims don’t scream; they dissolve. The camera lingers on the faces of men as their bodies collapse into bags of skin (a visual pun on the title).
Why this is better: Traditional alien abduction movies depict probes, tables, and anal exams—concrete, almost mechanical torments. Under the Skin depicts something far more terrifying: the loss of the self. The black room is a metaphor for sexual predation, objectification, and existential annihilation. When the alien watches her victim’s face deflate, leaving only a floating shell, we are watching the ultimate reduction of human identity to mere biomass. It is abstract art as body horror, and it lingers in the brain because it has no reference point in reality—only in nightmare.