Scarlett Johansson stars in Under the Skin, a 2013 sci-fi film directed by Jonathon Glazer and starring Scarlett Johansson. It’s a loose version of Michel Faber’s novel of the same name.
An extraterrestrial kidnaps individuals on Earth and sells their bodies to the aliens in the novel. Although the film deviates from the novel in certain ways, the novel’s impact is obvious. An extraterrestrial dressed in a woman’s skin prowls Glasgow, enticing men, luring them to her home, and drowning them in a pole that also serves as a food processor. The film seems futuristic and avant-garde, yet as the plot develops, it becomes increasingly grounded to Earth.
The film, which is full of intriguing images, keeps the suspense alive for the bulk of the time, making each disclosure more and more intriguing. Mica Levi’s spooky soundtrack just adds to the tension.
The woman’s life on Earth has given her insight into human emotions. She’s trying to figure out what’s going on beneath the skin of humans while we’re ignorant to what’s going on beneath hers.
Continue watching the video to learn everything there is to know about this film and its riddles, including the narrative, title, aliens, and more.
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Under the Skin of a Mysterious Woman’ is a book about a mysterious woman
A blob of matter floats across space. We hear the voice of a female who appears to be trying to communicate in English.
In a vehicle, a motorcycle transports an unconscious young woman to an unknown, scary location. The lady’s body is on the ground at that location, and a woman, portrayed by Scarlett Johansson, stands in front of her. She wears the clothes of the now barely conscious woman. We see a UFO, which indicates that the woman we just saw is an alien who has just touched down upon Earth.
The lady informs the biker, who is also an alien and her supervisor, about the event. They’d come to Earth to scavenge for human flesh. However, their hunting strategy was a little different. The woman would prey on people solo as the hunter. She would try to get men by seducing them and then take them to the ‘harvest pole’. Wondering what a harvesting pole is? We will get to that later.
The lady dresses up and attempts to serenade a man in preparation for her search. She gets him into his car and drives him to the reaping pole. After accompanying her into an old abandoned structure, the guy notices that it has been changed into a gloomy abyss. The woman begins to strip and the man gets mesmerized, or borderline hypnotized, by the sight. This trick is used to reduce their response powers and the man stripped down as well. But it’s not like he was about to get lucky. Some dark fluid began to drag him down, making it look like he was drowning.
The man recognized something wasn’t quite right halfway into the water, but it was too late pal. The bodies would be kept in the harvesting pole for a long period until their skin had peeled away from their bodies.
The lady walks on to her next target after successfully exploiting the prey. She’s on the beach when she runs into a diver. She is, however, interrupted because a neighboring family has encountered a major crisis. Their dog was pulled out to sea so the man and his wife went into the ocean to rescue it. However, the currents were too strong. Unfortunately, there was a distraught kid on the beach, crying. Seeing this, the diver rushes to save the family. The couple ends up dying.
As her targets are taken out into the water, the lady knocks the diver out with a rock. She takes him to the harvesting pole with her. In the meantime, the child remains stuck on the shore. The biker reaches the seaside at night and takes away the belongings of the family as any knowledge about the aliens could be problematic. But, the child still keeps crying and the man does not help the kid out. The aliens have no emotion. They just follow orders and carry out their duties.
The lady heads to a late-night tavern in search of a fresh target. She seduces a man and leads him to the harvesting pole. We have a great glimpse inside the pole when the new man drowns in the abyss. Suspended below, the guy sees the diver from the previous scene, who was alive but immobile. The new guy tries to reach out but when he comes in contact with the other guy, the diver’s body disappears, leaving his skin and hair behind.
As it empties down a trough, a red mass is hauled away in a belt. It’s human flesh, intended for eating by extraterrestrials.
For the woman, things start to shift. A seller hands her a rose while driving down the street, but the wrapping was stained with the vendor’s blood. Despite her cold and heartless demeanor thus far, the lady is taken aback when she sees blood. She finds a new prey and he compliments her eyes, which makes her happy. She listens to the radio news about a family going missing at the beach. After hearing about the kid being stranded, she begins to feel bad about it, showing traces of human emotions.
The woman’s boss, a biker, begins to notice that something is wrong with her. He pays her a visit one day and examines her eyes to see if she is following the orders because she was not permitted to defy her supervisor under any circumstances.
She seduces another man in her vehicle, played by Adam Pearson, who has facial tumors. Instead of utilizing prosthetic makeup on another actor, director Jonathon Glazer cast a person with neurofibromatosis to show sympathy for those with facial deformities.
The lady drags the male to the harvesting pole, stripping him naked in order to beguile him, and then devouring him. After that, she looks in the mirror and feels guilty for turning him into her victim. He was a good man and the woman had begun to second guess her actions. Overrun by her newly found conscience, she pulls him out of the pole and lets him go.
She recognizes as she drives her vehicle that she is about to get into problems with the motorcyclist for letting a prey go. After understanding that the man with the damaged face has been released, the biker pursues him. He intercepts him and kills him, without any harvest pole. He teams up with three other bikers to pursue the woman.
The woman was going through a transition, and she was starting to care about others and feeling things. She knew she was going to die, so she hid her automobile in the Scottish Highlands. In the fog, she walks by herself with the car abandoned and goes to a restaurant. There, she tries to enjoy human pleasures such as having cake. But since she did not have a human body, she retches and spits it out. But it’s the thought that counts here.
She rides the bus and meets a nice guy. He offers to assist her, and she accepts. He goes grocery shopping and brings her back to his house, where he prepares her dinner. The woman watches television and tries to understand what is going on, trying to wrap her mind around human humor. She later examines her naked body in the mirror, to understand it better. This was Scarlett’s first time appearing nude on the screen. She also tries to hook up with the man but it doesn’t work out as she is not human.
The lady travels through the woodland, struggling with her sudden sense of not belonging to either side. As she seeks refuge in a bothy, a logger comes across her and tries to molest her. She runs away but he pursues her, trying to rape her. But during the struggle, he tears off her skin, exposing her original, all black body. She comes out of the human skin and the man is terrified. He pours fuel all over her and lights her up. The woman tries to escape but ends up dying. She turns into ashes.
Meanwhile, the biker stands on a mountain, ignorant to the knowledge that she is dead, searching for her.
This film took 10 years to create, according to director Glazer. January Jones, Eva Green, Gemma Arterton, Olivia Wilde, and Abbie Cornish were all in the running for the lead, but Scarlett Johannson had been on board for four years and had won the role.
It’s a chilly film. The characters don’t have names, and the movie’s first conversation occurs after thirteen minutes. Because of the generally impersonal atmosphere, when Scarlett’s character first begins to feel emotions, no matter how minor, the impact is much greater. And they all begin to unfold from a pivotal scene – the one at the beach. At first, she is completely cool with leaving a stranded baby alone but it subconsciously has an effect on her, following which her character begins to unravel.
Alien & Human Harvesting pole Explored
The film has a strong focus on darkness – not figuratively, but practically. The ant the lady stares at in one of the first shots is completely dark, as is the spot where the biker examines the woman’s eyes, and, most crucially, the place where she brings her victims.
The woman proceeds to strip and entice the guys as she persuades them to accompany her to the harvest pole. Mesmerized and almost hypnotized by her beauty, the men get naked. But they are oblivious to what is about to come. She needs them to get naked because they are food and clothing fabric is not something the aliens wanted as their garnish.
The area is strange because, instead of getting scared or startled when the guys discover themselves in the vacuum, they show no emotion at all. The cons of being too thirsty. The black surface then begins to drag them inwards like quicksand. This is called the harvesting pole. To make matters simpler, think of it as a food processor. Not the type to be used by humans but rather, on them.
The men find themselves suspended in the liquid as they are submerged in it. There are no tubes or methods to empty them of their bodily parts, but the liquid appears to do it on its own. It sucks their internal organs, blood, and everything under the skin out of them while the skin and hair are left behind. Because when you eat eggs, you discard the egg shells.
At first, the body seems to be swollen and bubbled up. Then, with a boom, everything is condensed into a belt, leaving the shell in the pole. The internals slide down a chute and find themselves in a different space.
The aliens have arrived to Earth in order to eat humanity. It is surprising, though, that aliens are aware of how humans taste. Perhaps they’ve been here before and killed humans inadvertently for food. But that comes with a lot of complications. Police cases, people finding out, evidence, being on the run, to name a few of their possible worries. With the harvest pole’s food processing system, the process becomes a lot more efficient for the aliens. It is probably painless, as the victims are never seen struggling.
The victims are never killed right away. The tavern patron notices the swimmer suspended in the same place as him as he is immersed in the pole. The swimmer’s body is rippling and swollen, and he is still alive, but his body falls in front of the new person, and his insides are emptied into the belt. The process is slow as well. When the woman gets the disfigured man to get submerged in the pole, she later comes back in a couple of minutes to release him and he does not even have a dent on his body. Maybe something did happen as the process begins the moment a body is submerged but it is negligible.
The woman is a monster from another world. The motorcyclist is the same way. The other males who joined the biker in his search for the woman are as well. And by a stretch, the first woman we see is probably also an alien. The last one might sound strange but an explanation is incoming!
A small light shines in the distance as the film begins. It then becomes brighter until it completely dominates the screen. As though a human body is being synthesised, we watch the creation of an eyeball. The pupil floats towards the eye, taking its place in the designated spot and it denotes the completion of the synthetic creation.
When we first see the lady in Scarlett Johansson’s attire, we presume she is a human who is her first target, being carried by the motorbike. But come to think of it, she is probably an alien hunter who preceded Scarlett in the quest to process humans as food. However, she failed and it was time for her to get disposed off. Her physical features were similar to Scarlett’s, the clothes were a perfect fit, and they drove the same van.
She cries as well when we see her. She is frightened. This is quite human of her, but as the film unfolds, we witness Scarlett’s alien develop human feelings as well as a conscience. The same thing most likely happened to the lady, causing her to be discarded and replaced by another hunter. It can be a regular thing as well. Hunters come down to Earth to use humans as food but they develop a conscience every time. Then they are disposed off and their clothes and transport are passed down to the next hunter, over and over again. The moment they begin to neglect their duties, the motorcyclist kills them.
This explains their social structure and the relevance of the ant in the opening scene. During the moment with the woman, Scarlett Johansson examines an ant. The ant is never seen again but it gives us Scarlett’s position in the alien society. She is merely an ant in a colony full of ants, striving to serve the Queen as her worker.
The lady is a disposable ant who is intended to work without thinking. And if she doesn’t deliver, another dumb worker will take her place since she’s utterly replaceable. The motorcyclist men are ants as well, as they are all working under a higher extraterrestrial power. We don’t know of this higher power but it is an assumption made off of there being several such bikers who work for a common cause.
This is also the woman’s first contact with the physical world.
When the lady is stripped of her human skin in the final scene, we realise that she is a featureless entity with a body that is totally black, like an ant. She almost looks like an object and if you release her in a herd full of creatures from her species, they will all blend in with one another, looking like ants going about their day-to-day work.
When you consider that they can’t consume human food, can’t breed like humans, aren’t permitted to experience emotions, and spend their days working aimlessly, they resemble robots designed to act a specific way. But they are not. They are capable of developing feelings. However, they are cultivated in an environment that does not nurture such characteristics. However, these aliens aren’t invincible either, as seen from the scene where the logger douses the woman in fuel and kills her by lighting her on fire.
The woman’s superior is the biker. He, like the other three bikers, is an extraterrestrial who wears human skin and wears human clothing. His job is to provide the woman with resources, do regular inspections of her work, clean up after her so as to not leave any trace of their activities, and dispose of escapee victims and the woman when she is unable to deliver.
Other hunters are likely to be there, each led by a biker. Both, like ants, play a specific duty in the colony. Unlike the woman, the motorcyclist man isn’t given that much of a conscience. This can be directly due to the fact that the men do not interact with humans nearly as much as the woman, which strips him away from the opportunity to see life from a different perspective.
Under the Skin: Significance of the Title
“Never judge a book by its cover,” you’ve probably heard. Because of its familiarity, the cover of this film appears to be more appealing than the book itself. Humans are not familiar with seeing living bodies that look like a well-carved rock, or a store mannequin for that matter.
The woman is dressed in someone else’s clothing as the film begins. She spends numerous scenes analyzing and attempting to comprehend her human anatomy. And in the end, we get to see what is under the skin. However, that’s not all that there is to this title.
This lady has arrived to Earth to prey on humans. She is well aware of their pranks. She acquaints herself with their dialect. She learns how to speak as well as how to drive. She, on the other hand, does not comprehend them. Humans are emotional creatures but the woman’s alien race is not. As she interacts with civilization more and more, she begins to grow curious. And the more curious she grows, the more she tries to understand humans, which we can clearly see when she tries to understand humour while watching the television.
She’s curious about what goes on ‘beneath the skin’ of humans from a mental standpoint. Their decisions, their choices, and so forth. And when she begins to grasp at it a bit, she finds herself in the middle of crossroads, trying to decide whether she wants to kill these people or do her duty diligently.
She gradually gains an understanding of things as she observes people engage in activities such as watching sports or dressing up and applying cosmetics. During the beach scene, as the lady tries to save her dog and the husband leaps in to save her, there is a strong focus on human relationships. And the swimmer tries to save them both. This is in contrast to the personality of the woman and the biker who see the distraught baby and do nothing about it. Later on, several people on the streets help the woman when she trips. The compliments of the men gradually begin to make her happy as well.
Throughout the film, the lady meets mostly wonderful people and sees the positive side of humanity, but as she comes to grips with her newfound feelings, she experiences the negative side of humanity. In the forest, the logger tries to rape her and then eventually kills her. However, her antics have been similar to this throughout the movie as she lures men and then kills them.
Another fascinating connection is one in which the lady and the logger both kill their victims by piercing their flesh. The victims would be drained of their internal organs and everything under the skin, leaving the hair and skin behind. Similarly, after the logger sees what lies under the skin of the woman, he kills her.
Some teenagers had assaulted her truck when she was a frigid alien. It is not appropriate to label them as horrible or gloomy just because they are naughty children, but it contrasts with the overall assistance she has received. But as she was more alien back then, she remains unaffected by it and drives off. When she is attacked by the logger, she is more in touch with her emotional side and responds with terror.
With this, Glazer deconstructs the Alien vs. Human dynamic and demonstrates how dualism exists on both sides.
What are the benefits of watching Under the Skin?
Under The Skin is a master of suspense. We don’t gain a lot of insight into the characters or knowledge about what will happen because the idea is quite remote and chilly. As a result, you are less likely to predict what is going to happen next because you do not have the ingredients to curate it in the first place. And with the cold nature of the movie, the suspense and mystery get ample amounts of space for a build up.
People have a lot to think about when they see an extraterrestrial struggle with empathy because it puts the lady in a grey area. Humans are neither good nor wicked by nature, but we are all products of our surroundings. And this sci-fi madness does a splendid job in hitting the nail with that. The hypnotic soundtrack and the lighting during the harvest pole scene gives movie nerds another extra layer of information to obsess over.