Subtitles:

English (SDH), English, Spanish, none

Extras:

• 10 Production Featurettes - Camera, Casting, Editing etc. (42:23)

• Previews (12:12)

• Bookmarkable

Scarlett Johansson as an extraterrestrial femme fatale cruising the streets of Glasgow in Jonathan Glazer’s cerebral sci-fi horror fantasy “Under the Skin” is an indelible personification of predatory allure. Wearing a dark wig and a fake-fur jacket, her character, an alien with a sinister agenda, is as fetishized an object of desire as Marlene Dietrich admired through the lens of Josef von Sternberg. You may also think of Ava Gardner, as perfect a female specimen as Hollywood ever produced, coldly working her wiles.

Ms. Johansson’s luscious, cherry-red lips, onto which she is shown daubing deeper shades of crimson, seem to have an extra cushion of softness. In “Under the Skin,” it is as if the voice of Samantha — the operating system Ms. Johansson voiced in “Her” — has taken human form. But instead of a seemingly empathetic cyberfriend, she turns out to be a heartless humanoid temptress from outer space.

Johansson delivers a career best performance as the alien seductress - with her cool, blank expression and air of chilling detachment, she is nothing less than astonishing (even the middle-class London accent she adopts is excellent). It's an extraordinary piece of work, haunting, entrancing and utterly convincing - she's even more alien than David Bowie, in The Man Who Fell To Earth, her nearest cinematic equivalent (well, next to Natasha Henstridge in Species).

Glazer's script removes some of the context from the novel, leaving the alien's motivations all the more frightening for being deliberately unexplained. Similarly, the relative lack of dialogue leaves the audience clinging to every flicker of movement on Johansson's face as a clue to what might be going on; a disorienting experience that is deeply strange and unsettling, most notably in a scene shot on the beach with the alien blankly ignoring the cries of a baby whose parent has been swept out to sea after trying to rescue a dog.

Gary Tooze

July 6th, 2014