Review: Jonathan Glazer's "Under the Skin" is a haunting, unforgettable masterpiece
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Few films, if any, have left me as thoroughly shaken as Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. It is a film that can be reduced to one sentence narratively – Scarlett Johansson plays a mysterious alien in the form of a beautiful woman who prowls the streets of London, seducing and trapping lonely young men, before having an existential crisis and abandoning her mission to further explore her human form – but is so much vaster than any verbal description can suggest, irreducible even to concrete thoughts or interpretations. The film is utterly hypnotic, aesthetically exhilarating and intoxicating to such extreme degrees that time becomes immaterial while watching – at 108 minutes, it feels both eternally long and impossibly short, seeming to last for a mere instant yet with the impact of a cinematic lifetime – and as much as any movie can, it lingers on the brain long after the credits roll, burrowing further and further into one’s psyche the longer one spends away from it. When the film ended, I wanted only to rush back to the box office and buy another ticket, and while that proved impractical at the time, I am positively chomping at the bit to revisit the film at the first opportunity I get.
Review: Jonathan Glazer's "Under the Skin" is a haunting, unforgettable masterpiece
Review: Jonathan Glazer's "Under the Skin" is…
Review: Jonathan Glazer's "Under the Skin" is a haunting, unforgettable masterpiece
Few films, if any, have left me as thoroughly shaken as Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. It is a film that can be reduced to one sentence narratively – Scarlett Johansson plays a mysterious alien in the form of a beautiful woman who prowls the streets of London, seducing and trapping lonely young men, before having an existential crisis and abandoning her mission to further explore her human form – but is so much vaster than any verbal description can suggest, irreducible even to concrete thoughts or interpretations. The film is utterly hypnotic, aesthetically exhilarating and intoxicating to such extreme degrees that time becomes immaterial while watching – at 108 minutes, it feels both eternally long and impossibly short, seeming to last for a mere instant yet with the impact of a cinematic lifetime – and as much as any movie can, it lingers on the brain long after the credits roll, burrowing further and further into one’s psyche the longer one spends away from it. When the film ended, I wanted only to rush back to the box office and buy another ticket, and while that proved impractical at the time, I am positively chomping at the bit to revisit the film at the first opportunity I get.