Recommendation | What is Hidden Under the Skin?

Under the Skin (2013), a film by Jonathan Glazer (presented at the Utopia Film Festival) tells the story of a mysterious beauty (Scarlet Johansson) who travels around Scotland, picking up hitchhikers, whom she leads into a space that may be called, following Freud, the Unheimlich. The film is a story about relationship between men and women, otherness and difference and what is found “Under the Skin”.

The film uses a documentary-like style of cinematography, using the “hidden camera” technique, to tell a story about the fear of losing control, the connection between sex and death, and the built-in alienation in human relationships from what they perceive as “other.”

The film leaves its viewers in a state of uncertainty until its end, thus sharpening its message about the inability to understand the “other”, peel off the layers and get to the “truth” about the essence of human existence.

This is a disturbing film that deals with the central themes of the science fiction genre: What does “human” mean? What is the difference between the human and the non-human? Can we sketch the border line between the human and the “alien”? At the end of this mysterious journey, we are left with more questions than answers. In fact, one can say that the film illustrates through its cinematic expression the interpretive failure. That is, the ambiguity of the film is both a cinematic tool and a philosophical statement: we can never really understand what is not “us”.

The film is based on a successful novel of the same name by Michael Faber, in which, contrary to the cinematic adaptation, a more explicit explanation is given about the essence of the mystery it is centered around. While the novel is a parable about the slave / master relationship between man and animals, and between men and women as a thematic counterpart of this enslavement, Glazer’s film remains open for interpretation.

The book and film are two recommended and fascinating works, especially after we found ourselves reflecting quite a bit on invisible threats from the outside, entering “inside”, into the body, into the home space that was once perceived as protected, and that today, we have learned to know also as a place of isolation and lockdown. A period in which the “stranger” is us. We were told to stay away from anyone who is “other”, even those who are closest to us.

Scarlet Johansson in the Uncanny space of “Under the Skin”, Jonathan Glazer, 2013

Like other texts of the science fiction genre, “Under the Skin” also tells us something about human existence through a story about danger from the “outside”. “Under the Skin” tells us a story about ourselves through alienation of the familiar and making it Unheimlich, uncanny, different, threatening, and undermining the very existence of the boundaries between the body and what is outside it. In doing so, this film becomes more relevant than ever and provides a thought-provoking experience of our human existence in hostile spaces and under threats that are hidden from the eye.