Under the Skin (2014) dir. Jonathan Glazer

it is weird - I do find myself being more affected by certain types of scenes, post-parenthood. Infant-related stuff not so much (I don't really have a hard time divorcing scenes with infants from reality), but certain things about parents relating to their kids and vice versa can really affect me.

The beach scene *really* upset my wife.

oooh, just found out one of my friends is playing drums for this:
http://www.theregenttheater.com/event/722411-screening-under-skin-wild-los-angeles/

How can anyone care for the baby when the poor dog's drowning horribly beforehand?

the entire situation was the stupid dog's fault, iirc

pulling some kind of reverse-Lassie

Dog was part of the alien team.

Maybe some other enigmatic alien swooped by to harvest the baby.

There's a bonus disc in the DVD set that features several hours of the baby at home with its new parents, who are more supportive and loving than its previous parents.

Oh good that's a relief. Does the DVD indicate whether the child would go on to suffer adverse effects from the beach scene in later life?

The baby was taken to the Snowpiercer train.

dog lovers shd avoid The Babadook btw

good to know, my gf was already reticent and now i know never to watch it in my house.

there's v obvious foreshadowing, so obvious I couldn't believe it when fulfilled.

there's v obvious foreshadowing

As in, if there's a dog in a horror movie, and that dog has a name, chances are it is doomed?

well i don't see many horror movies as it's the worst genre for that and other reasons

Morbs, if you see a dog in a horror movie, and that dog has a name ...

lol @ calling horror the worst genre

can't believe i took so long to get round to this. incredible film. was utterly absorbed at every moment and wished it wouldn't end - love films where you're in this bubble of seeing the world differently, it feels disorientating coming back to reality.

what did SJ do with the body of the czech guy whose head she bashed in? take him back to eat as well? all her other victims were lured into the black pool alive, but would clubbing them over the head beforehand work just as well?

have to say i found the baby beach scene more blackly comic than remotely horrifying, i was more distressed about the poor dog. actually, that's not quite true - i felt dispassionate during it, as i felt dispassionate towards SJ's sundry victims, because you're not just seeing ~ordinary glasgow through an alien's eyes but with her emotional disinterest too. again, a bit like a bubble.

i was glad i had a passing acquaintance with glasgow, enough to recognise places but not so much that it was distracting.

as much as i didn't want that ending, i appreciate not going the route of suddenly giving the alien powers - her fear and flight from the rapist was when she became human, as vulnerable as a human, after failing to become so with human pleasures.

the motorcyclists (who increased in number as she went off piste, right?) reminded me of buzzing drone bees trying to recapture an errant queen...

would LOVE to see the footage they couldn't use, if there was any disappointment it was that there didn't seem to be that many SJ/ordinary glaswegian scenes. presumably the guys she actually got back to her lair were actors, though if they managed to get a random off the streets to get hard on camera, kudos to all involved i guess

oh yeah and i loved the scene where she got swept into the club by the posse of girls! what club was that, glaswegians? (also what club would be playing "sandstorm" in this decade...)

A long long time ago in a galaxy far away ....

"the motorcyclists (who increased in number as she went off piste, right?) reminded me of buzzing drone bees trying to recapture an errant queen..."

I didn't think they increased in number. I thought it was just the same one guy the whole way through. I need to watch this again because I'm still thinking about it two weeks later.

Months on, this is the movie of 2014 that's probably haunted me most. Images from it just pop into my head sometimes. Is the book worth reading? I understand it's quite different. Would having seen the film diminish reading the book?

I keep getting images too. And I keep thinking about the scene where they start to have sex and she examines her vagina and then how she's woken and exposed by the rapist logger and what that means etc. The final image keeps popping into my head often.

I didn't think they increased in number. I thought it was just the same one guy the whole way through.

i def recall a scene where there were four?

i'm still thinking about it too

yeah there were more motorcycle people at the end, good catch

God, I totally missed that!

Would having seen the film diminish reading the book?

Nah I don't think so, they're very different aside from the basic scenario. It's interesting to have the book in mind just to think about the filmmakers' choices though.

Also, I think this is one of the few examples where I'd prefer to see the film before reading the book. The film is an extreme stripped down version of the idea of the book, it truly is "based on the book" in the sense that the book has a whole other dimension to the plot.

I also thought there was only one motorcyclist btw!

I kind of hated the ending of the book when I read it although I loved it up to that point. the movie is much more haunting and ambiguous and weird.

TBH, the central themes of the book are at right angles to those of the film, and the book is so frequently internal dialogue its nigh unfilmable. They're two distinct entities that share little besides an alien picking up unattached hitchhikers on Scottish A roads.

^ internal monologue

well there's 2 hours i won't get back.

I think it was too short. Not that I was crazy about it or anything but I wanted more stages.

http://nomoredeaddogs.tumblr.com/post/84245309417/under-the-skin-2014-i-forgot-there-was-a-dog

:(

never really thought this merited the hype when i saw it. but am going to watch on dvd this week - i think i already wrote about it upthread when it was released but it does seem like a warpfilms, lo budget brit sci fi kind of film, one that would work better at home than in the cinema. just remember finding it quite choppy in terms of its flow, and a bit jarringly edited, more a sequence of setpieces than a narrative, as if they were a bit too razor happy in the editing room. glazer's nicole kidman film was better.

http://reverseshot.org/features/1988/two_cents_2014

Under the Skin is perfect, in its way: it nails that brand of cool distance familiar from certain strands of art-world installation work, Björk music videos, Lexus commercials, and…almost any other arty indie sci-fi film. Indeed, its icy perfection becomes all terribly expected after a point, and going back over the film, looking at its shooting strategies, it feels less a work of rigor than one of remove. Even so, its fans generally came off like a pack of forty-niners in their rush to be the first to label it “Kubrickian.” It’s clear that Jonathan Glazer, who last gave us the risible Birth, has seen A Clockwork Orange (dig that near-future retro-present shtick!), The Shining (marvel at those geometrically precise compositions and sickening string glissandos!), and, of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey (visual abstractions and cosmic ambiguity!). But one wonders if he’s really taken in Barry Lyndon (for wryly undercutting its lush romanticism), Full Metal Jacket (for conveying righteous anger in the face of senseless, real-life horror), Eyes Wide Shut (for its clear-eyed yet oddly romantic examination of the marital institution), or hell, even Dr. Strangelove (for its bawdy hilarity). The insurmountable gap between Glazer and Kubrick seems plain: both have formidable command over the stuff cinema is made of, but Kubrick was able to consistently marshal that talent into expressive works that speak beyond themselves, to the world at large. Under the Skin is airless, worked over within an inch of its life, and might well look better in a gallery than a movie theater. What exactly are we to take away from it? That humanity is special and rare and to be cherished? That alienation is the modern condition and the lot of everyone, even space vixens? One wonders, if you removed the aesthetic bells and whistles, what’s left under Under the Skin. —Jeff Reichert

Nah

What makes a film feminist? You can start by having a woman or group of women make the movie. You don’t have to address the sex lives of women, but if you do, they don’t have to be slut-shamed. You can pass the Bechdel Test (though Under the Skin doesn’t) and portray the lives of women as they are actually experienced. A sci-fi or fantasy film that suspends or hyperbolizes certain aspects of reality can play around even more. In Under the Skin, we get an alien wearing a woman-suit, but she (it?) is not necessarily concerned with being a “woman” at all. Though she understands the seductive powers of feminine wiles, it’s all a ruse, a means to a different, gooier end than her male victims imagine. This premise, which the first half of the film sets up, brims with feminist potential, as many critics have noted. But when this unfeeling alien encounters a man with a face disfigured by neurofibromatosis, instead of ingesting him like anyone else, she spares (i.e. friend-zones) him. Moreover his “specialness” triggers her curiosity about, and sympathy for, being human. Of course the exceptional treatment of disabled characters is nothing new in film and television, but this is more than a regrettably clunky episode. Because feminism is not about “women” so much as it is about toppling patriarchy, a system that says that some bodies matter more than others, whatever feminist statement this film is trying to make is almost entirely undone by this hackneyed trope. Disability is not incidental or adjacent to feminism, but wholly shares in its anti-patriarchal critique. Under the Skin punts on this very issue. Unlike, say, the dwarf-tossing incident in The Wolf of Wall Street, where the depraved treatment of the disabled illustrates Jordan Belfort’s inhuman callousness, Under the Skin comes off as sanctimonious and inconsistent (and still sexist). Though it shows how bad it is to be a woman in this world—constantly subjected to the predatory behavior of men, threatened with rape, etc.—it wrongly exempts the disfigured man from this misery. Instead of sharing in the lot of the disadvantaged, or even the privilege of men, it treats him, like so many movies, as someone outside the system, no more than a magical talisman. —Genevieve Yue

so basically men with sexual desire get killed. men without apparent desire get the girl (even if they dont get to take them to bed). so kind of like, women dont want to have sex, they just want a friend. did stephen fry write this movie?

surprised not to see the word "problematic" in that one

The first review proceeds from an irrelevant strawman to a useless catalog of things the film isn't. The second, similarly, faults Glazer's film for approaches it fails to take, critiques it doesn't make. Both refuse to work up from what the film actually is to whatever it might mean. Under the Skin concerns an attempt to construct and comprehend identity in response to the perceptions and behavior of others (that behavior, in turn, a reflection of external appearances). It's about reverse-engineering the self. In this context, the alien's response to the disfigured man makes perfect sense. The creature is fascinated by the implications of appearance and difference, seemingly troubled by the unbridgeable gap between superficial and interior reality.

Also, I'm getting sick of asides suggesting that the film presents the protagonist as "constantly subjected to the predatory behavior of men". This is simply not true. The truck driver who appears at the end is really the only male character who fits this description.

^^^

yeah those are both weird takes.

What exactly are we to take away from it? That humanity is special and rare and to be cherished? That alienation is the modern condition and the lot of everyone, even space vixens?

my own feeling is that the movie is about the horror of recognizing the opposite. her inability to be a "person" uncannily reflects back at us.

this movie is bad because it doesn't contain Stanley Kubrick's entire filmography

yeah that was fucking stupid

true of most movies tbh

i don't get the kubrick thing at all. what was kubricky about it?

true of most movies tbh

― ryan, Thursday, January 22, 2015 5:50 PM (22 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

kubrick's for a start

I didn't think Of Kubrick once watching this myself

maybe there's arguably some thematic things in common but it doesn't look or feel like a kubrick movie at all. and while i dont think it's better than really any of kubrick's movies that's hardly a knock against it.