Under the Skin (2014) dir. Jonathan Glazer

I liked Birth a lot, but have never understood the reverence for Sexy Beast, which I found to be basically a ridiculous farce. This new movie sounds really bad.

Sexy Beast was a good larf tho; never took it as more.

sexy beast is a pretty sweet flick, w/3 really great and vv different performances occupying the center. lots of ridiculousness there, true.

sexy beast was the first time i saw ian mcshane in anything and he was terrifying

yeah mcshane struck a good balance in the film of being utterly scary and perpetually bemused and coldly but fairly logical.

man i just don't know if I can credit this film with being not -awful

For the first half or so, I found myself wishing that I didn't know Glasgow

well i saw this yesterday in Glasgow, then afterwards walked round many of the locations seen in the film, and there was something very exciting and unusual abt this slippage between the screen and the real, for me.

loved this, slower, more abstract than i was expecting, but really haunting, and a film where you cld easily be ambushed by unexpected emotion. haven't seen glazer's other two movies, but here i admired his brass balls/confidence in treating the material in this way (as someone said to me, "the plot sounds just like Species")

Seeing this at the GFT tomorrow. Haven't been as excited for a film in a long while.

I loved this too, although I wonder if being a stranger in Glasgow gave it some added resonance for me. I did prefer the first half to the second half although that seems to be the case with 9 out of 10 films I see recently. And yeah, there were 2 or 3 scenes which blew me away.

Saw it for a second time today. I was able to relax more in the early scenes, but am even more convinced that it's the section from when she picks up the man with neurofibromatosis through to the sex scene that's the dizzyingly great peak of the film.

like is it a sad sack sex scene with canon in d playing or a pisstake of same, and either way how do you reconcile not seeing it as awful with considering yourself an adult

loved this

Are you calling me a child for liking that scene, thomp, or have I misunderstood your post?

this looks like complete trash, only skimmed the anthony lane profile of ScarJo+review of this in latest New Yorker and threw the magazine across the room.

I should say pretentious trash

but maybe I'm wrong, guess I'll never know...

This will be my favorite movie of the year but for the buttsex in Stranger by the Lake.

but have you seen nymphomaniac?

lots of sex to choose from

Top 3's gonna be pretty sexy.

(4?)

Stranger by the Lake, Under the Skin and Nymphomaniac actually are the best three new films I've seen this year.

Think I've reached my 2014 cock quota now.

Wait til you see the Godzilla reboot and why what made the hole in that skyscraper may surprise you.

stranger by the lake opens here tonight, am psyched for cinematic cock.

although i get the feeling there may be some walkouts by older folk who "went to see that new French movie"

I wonder if the theater is even aware that real! homosexual! fellatio! is happening on one of their screens.

The scotch-guarding will tip you off.

not sure why certain people are so eager to damn this sight unseen. Possibly they're just idiots

people who don't share your opinions are idiots

i'm damning it sight seen. that's because it's a really stupid movie

people who share my opinions are idiots

i get a whiff of glazer trying to do the whole french-cinema-of-extremity thing a decade late

wronger than ever

I found this kind of disappointing. V enjoyable in many places, but overall the same kind of long slow shots in lieu of much of anything new, that I'm getting a little bored of. I saw it in the same cinema I saw Upstream Color so I think that has affected my take on it slightly (had a similar reaction to that).

v scared of this

Loved hearing all the strong Glasgow accents talking to Scarlett Johansson - though I instinctively think of Limmy (how ace would that've been, in the club scene)

for a moment i thought you mentioned lemmy

So the script development with this was like:

'what would it be like if Scarlett Johansson walked around a shopping centre?'

'what would it look like if Scarlett Johansson watched Tommy Cooper?' (genuinely awesome, that's what)

etc etc.

There was certainly an undercurrent of displaying a disgrace at the way men behave and conduct themselves in regards to women. Not that its gonna stop Scarlett - its sorta like a distant cousin of Story of O or Maitresse with the SF/Species angle and then all the walking and driving around with nowhere to go was a hint of Patrick Keiller too? It hints at those things without taking anything too far which is perhaps for the best.

Interested in reading the novel its based on - no time right now.

i enjoyed the novel, that's pretty much the only reason i want to see this (just to see how they approached it).

It has very little to do with the novel

really wanted to love this but found it underwhelming. its like they boiled it down to its most basic essence so far that all that was left was not actually all that much. found the switching between gritty uk realism and the sci fi sequences to not be all that consequential, though the mix did remind me of holy motors quite a bit. SJ is brilliant, but id have liked her to have just a little more to do. i think everyone going ape over this just wants to back something that isnt easy to like, but im not sure it was worth the wait exactly - its not a failure, but not a masterpiece either. shame cos i liked sexy beast and birth a lot - glazers an interesting director, but after all the hype, i just expected more than a microbudget slice of kitchen sink scottish sci fi. in fact, i wish all the 'interesting' films this year werent so hyped, id probably have liked her, and this one, a bit more, if i hadnt heard so much about them before. it does have some great scenes, but as a whole, its just a bit hmmmm.

also couldnt help feeling dissapointed that all the realisations that SJ's alien came to were all so familiar for anyone whos watched even a few of these aliens-on-earth kind of films. the arthouse treatment of that did make this a bit different, but not THAT different. felt the film didnt really have much to say - it was the style that made this novel, a bit like birth in a way, as the 'dead-person-in-someone-elses-body' thing had been done before that film too, but it was the icy space of it that made it feel different. bit tired of directors thinking empty space alone can excuse paucity of new ideas though.

i agree with all of that except that i don't think SJ was brilliant

though if she wasn't i don't think it was her fault

this was basically a film that could have come out on warp films. i wish someone had told me this before i went to see it, as i was expecting some sort of coldly sublime kubrickian sci-fi, not a film about how its grim up in scotland, with some vaguely rendered outsider perspective to put that point across. also found the score interesting and effective, but never as haunting/fear-inducing as some reviews seem to have made out. it was a bit too measured and subtle. the whole thing should have been MUCH scarier/eerier.

for some reason, i kept thinking of trash humpers while watching this. i think it was the horrific mindlessness of the beach scene (which still makes me uncomfortable).

how does this compare to Morvern Callar?

in terms of boobs?

i would say MC is the superior film

I read this book around the same time I saw Morvern Callar, I think, and always envisioned Emily Watson in this role. And wasn't Lynne Ramsay attached to this at some point? Maybe not. Anyway if this comes out in the US I'm sure I'll see it. I actually kind of hated the book when I read it.

thought this was genuinely incredible, beautiful. "ambushed by unexpected emotion" is correct. and i left the cinema woozily looking at glaswegians like they were aliens. a totally unique experience, overall.

Absolutely with you jed! Went to see this tonight at Cineworld and was utterly stunned by it.

Well the big joke is that these dudes are willing to follow a woman who looks like scarjo into what looks like a crack den if they think they’re gonna get laid, though you could certainly argue maybe that would be true with any moderately attractive woman though making it her I think does make it funnier

My wife was def into this movie
Xp

It's not really a comedy though, is it? I don't think I laughed once during the whole thing, although, like I said, I really liked this movie! It's good, but I didn't laugh. Certainly never like "lol they're falling for her cause she's moderately attractive at least" cause I mean what's funny about that. That's just human nature. If you're a straight guy, haven't you ever fallen for someone super hot who actually talked to you for a little bit? And from the moment that started to happen, weren't you sorta on the clock to figure out whether this clearly hot person is worth being talked to by your obviously superior intellect? And should you feel ashamed about it if you decided she is? I never found a "big joke" in this movie, but it did make me feel ashamed of all the times I ever thought with my balls, and it did feel like some sort of feminist masterpiece that I'll probably always be under and never really understand.

this didn't seem comedic to me at all.

I've only seen it once but the motorcyclist seemed like some kind of alien handler who was ultimately in a position of control

stephanie zacharek liked it:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2014/04/02/under-the-skin-is-alluring-creepy-and-great/

the genius of the movie for me was its showing a view of human empathy from a completely outside perspective, thought it was moving

I know women who rate it pretty high, I obv can’t speak for their precise reasons but it takes on stuff like the male gaze and gendered power dynamics pretty explicitly.

Scarlett Johansson being in it obviously helped the movie get made & get seen, but I think it’s one of those cases where that also works artistically. There are obv many different layers and readings that can be brought to bear, but the larger context of viewers being aware of her as a giant movie star and international sex symbol is definitely at play in how the movie is operating and what its doing, imo

I mean I just thought it was funny that she led these dudes into this sketchy as fuck building and they blissfully went along. It’s funny because it’s ridiculous and yet totally believable.

Poll: Would you walk into black water for Scarlet Johanson?

Y
N

I've been to places that look like where she takes the men but I am from Glasgow ymmv if you have lived bougiely only

cause like I can't imagine it being as big a hit/making as much of an impact with an actress less hot than The Scarjo, and that seems ironically problematic maybe? haven't figured it out yet, but I did like this movie

― del griffith, Friday, September 6, 2019 8:59 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it wasn't a hit, it made half its budget back. seems weird bc it made an impact, at least at the time, I've been meaning to check this out for 5+ years based on one perfect recommendation ("Under the Skin tho"). and shakey is right about Stranger Things ripping this off and doing it worse

alright well not a hit, but the reason we're all talking about it now.

and it's not really about Glasgow though is it? it's about men being taken in by attractive women no matter what hopeless environment they happen to find themselves in, and therein lies the trap.

What’s weird is that the beach scene didn’t disturb me as much as it did many others (although I also didn’t find it “hilarious”, wtf) but the scene of the guy watching the other guy get sucked out of his skin and then watching the empty skin float around in the void is one of the most disturbing nightmare images I’ve ever seen in a movie.

N, but I don't think it was just black water. The endless white/black plane of the "seduction" scenes (nods to THX 1138) would have left me limply curious. Maybe it related to the rundown tenement as the interior of the Tardis, but if taken as presented and not a visual metaphor, the victims have tunnel vision I've never experienced except under psychedelics. There's some trancranial magnetic stimulation (etc) going on.

Mild spoilers for book: In Faber's book, while the protagonist Isserley may use (artificial) feminine charms to keep the victims talking until she can confirm they won't be missed, there's no undressing, just a button in the dash that activates autoinjectors under the passenger seat. The cinematic version is far better.

TBF, the film retains very little from the book besides "female appearing alien develops misgivings about abducting male hitchhikers in Scotland for further processing". I like the "alien anthropologist goes native" thread of the film, and I don't think the book's focuses on class consciousness, backbreaking labor, or factory farming could have worked visually.

I liked this movie but haven't seen it since it was in cinemas. I read the book not long ago, impressive how they got from that to the movie but it's a great movie. I was actually going to watch it again last night but ran out of time. I'd forgotten the beach scene, think that would be hard to watch again.

I'm a woman btw

do any women like this movie? just curious

― del griffith, Saturday, September 7, 2019 12:58 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

It remains my favourite film of the decade.

― tangenttangent, Friday, September 6, 2019 7:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I am a woman and I enjoyed this movie as well as the soundtrack.

https://news.avclub.com/watch-the-fall-a-nightmarish-new-short-from-under-th-1840036328

new glazer short

with mica levi score

I'm a massive Glazer fan but I thought this was a bit ehhh

same

Is it just the BBC who have it online for the UK still?

Yes, it's a BBC production.

Thanks. One of those rare times I'm frustrated as a TV non-licensee. Oh well, I'll wait until it appears somewhere, doesn't sound crucial viewing.

a man of principles!

Or a man of laziness!

Actually got the Opera browser's built-in VPN to work, so I'll watch it later on the US site, once darkness falls.

I agree that it's a bit something and nothing. There's some cool shots and it's decently unsettling, but I thought there was very little to it. Oh well.

I have a coworker who actively dislikes this one and complains about it being recommended to him as horror, but I think it’s very much in the ponderous genre subset and I get that it’s not for all

Do you mean Under The Skin? For clarity, I was talking about The Fall immediately above.

ahh, yeah. UtS

NEW GLAZER

Jonathan Glazer’s THE ZONE OF INTEREST. Coming soon. pic.twitter.com/PZJ3EFj6PS

— A24 (@A24) May 8, 2023

Mentioned in the Cannes thread. A little put off because Amis, but def interested