../under-the-skin

Under the Skin

At a glance...

While I loved the visual language of the first half of this film and found ample room to find transness in the vague vibes of it all, the ending of Under the Skin did not do it for me. Structurally I suppose it makes sense in that 90% of this movie is "the female" having random encounters with men. She learns some degree of self-consciousness from her encounter with "the deformed man" (that's how he's named in the credits), and on the flip side she meets her ultimate demise to the logger. But in terms of content and what it's saying, this ending is a sudden wallop to the head after 90 minutes of vague hintings toward connection, humanity, and the struggle to communicate.

There are pieces of a narrative puzzle that I feel are unanswered. The amber lights that culminate in this montage of ordinary women spending time with each other and being together, all to crescendo into Scarlett Johansson's face, read to me as like the blossoming of the desire to be a woman. But the movie never gives any time to actually show our main character having any interactions with other women whatsoever, even failed ones! And with the way it concludes, with a hypnic jerk of overt sexual violence, the fable instead becomes cynical and bleak. "To be a woman is to perform endlessly for men, whom you will never surpass and are so vulnerable to that any random man could annihilate you on a whim. To be a woman is to be eternally vigilant, even if you wish to slaughter men you must have a fortress from which to do so. The moment you leave your car, your van, your house, you become a target. You are alone. Know how to defend yourself, or perish."

I think a certain subgenre of trans woman will find this film deeply relatable, and I think if you do not see a transgender story in this, you're liable to respond to those women with a typical, "welcome to womanhood!" at the end of this film. To me, the only good reading of this movie is a transgender one. The female's rehearsed and stilted dialogue with the men in her van, her need to only express herself in specific contexts where it's safe, her total and complete isolation from other women, her anxiety and fear about her body and what it might reveal, all of this is easily read as a transfeminine experience. And in the transgender reading, we can fully alienate the female and annihilate her in the end and it is even justified to a lot of people in this world.

But the movie can just as easily be about the dangers of promiscuity, the world of violence that awaits you when you leave the safety of your personal vehicle, the threat of strangers lurking about in the world who will rape you at a moment's notice. (And this reading is especially pernicious since an overwhelming majority of sexual violence is perpetrated by people the victim already knows, both in Scotland where the film is set and in the United States where I'm writing this. Going from pure probabilities, the man who kills the female at the end should have been the nice guy at the bus stop who took her in!)

Vagueness is a double-edged sword. It can buy you interpretive freedom and creative expression. It can also reveal what you see as being beyond the fog, being solid, concrete, and undeniable. The movie did not have to end this way and I realize the futility in writing a review that's just litigating what you wish happened instead of what did happen. But the problem is that by being so disjoint, with so much negative space in the editing, writing, everything, Under the Skin feels random. And it ends at random, too. Instead of coming together in any form, which I think it absolutely had the ability to do, a random act of violence snuffs out a glowing, amber light that has been driving you through the first 90 minutes. From the ways I was wanting to interpret the beginning of this film, I felt really let down, so much so that I actually rewatched this movie a week later to confirm my feelings, to really understand if I was crazy or not. But I've seen it a second time for this review and I have to conclude that this movie is, at best, a cheap thrill for me.

Other thoughts

I wrote so many words for my attempts at reviewing this movie. I think this is also going in the essay bait bucket, not by itself but in an essay exploring and really considering vagueness in movies. I think on the whole I have a chip on my shoulder regarding interpretive vagueness in films; if you give me space I want to be able to run. My biggest struggle with this review was trying to run with the negative space, of which the beginning half of this film has in spades, only to always run into the brick wall that is the ending. There's no room to consider anything else in this story because of how this movie ends.

I also think I have some thinking to do about science fiction. Recently I put on a movie for a small group of friends for a celebration and I talked about science fiction and the tiresome use of speculative fiction for allegories for existing social ills. (We watched Face/Off that day and that is in no way an allegory for anything.) I was probably thinking of this movie when I wrote that because I had been starting and restarting this review for a week or so. I guess I don't think fable and allegory are bad, but especially in this movie it feels weirdly limiting. All of this silence, this playing in whispers, only to be drowned out by a very conventional idea that isn't even necessarily proportional to it's existence in real life. Did we even need the science fiction to say this much?

I keep wanting to write about this film because I just feel so unsatisfied and for some reason I really wanted it to be satisfying to me. I was really grooving with the beginning of this, ya'll. Shots where 90% of the screen is inky blackness and a tiny dot of light flies around, whooshing trees and natural beauty filled with these scenes of strange death and light. I wanted to love this, it just did not come together at the end for me, and the more I thought about it the more annoyed I got.

/2024/ /2.5 stars/