She sheds most of those inhibitions in this film, although these moments are modest compared to the voyeurisic excesses of movies such as Blue is the Warmest Colour.Īt the beginning of the story Johansson’s character seems only slightly more nuanced than David Bowie’s portrayal of a spaced-out alien in Nic Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Despite this reputation, Johansson has shown a marked reluctance to do the nude scenes that seem obligatory today for actresses young and old. Whereas Faber’s Isserley is a stunted, near-crippled figure with oversized breasts, the film’s protagonist is Scarlett Johansson, admired as one of the sexiest women in Hollywood. Glazer and his scriptwriter, Walter Campbell, take the story into a dark, psycho-sexual realm where desire is punished with infernal torments.Ĭrucial to this impression is the character of the alien seductress, who will be both hunter and hunted as the story progresses. We can see that the males are turned into some sort of gloop, but it is nothing like the orderly farming and processing that takes place in the novel.
It’s never quite clear what happens next. In this version she sits behind the wheel of a big 4 wheel drive, and lures her victims back to a darkened dwelling where they literally disappear into the floor while thinking only of sexual conquest. She is aided by a nameless man on a motorcycle who tidies up the evidence. We begin by seeing the protagonist taking the clothing of a young woman who seems to have drowned. In Glazer’s version none of the characters have names. Almost everything else in this adaptation is radically different from the novel, with the changes lending the story a degree of mystery that can be almost incomprehensible. Seeing the hitchhikers through Isserley’s eyes, they really did seem to be talking beasts.īritish director, Jonathan Glazer, has borrowed Faber’s core idea of an alien in the shape of a woman who drives around picking up male hitchhikers. With black humour Faber explored issues of race, gender, vivisection, and what it meant to be a terminal outsider. In the novel, Isserley’s race refer to themselves as human beings, while earthlings are “Vodsels”. The four-legged inhabitants of Isserley’s planet have developed a taste for human meat, which is sold as an expensive delicacy.
Under the Skin introduced a new kind of heroine – Isserley – an alien surgically transformed to resemble a human being, who drives around Scotland in an old Toyota, picking up male hitchhikers who are taken back to a plant for processing. Dick and Stanislaw Lem – that ever made me feel like going back for a second helping. I say that as a reader who has dipped into science fiction for decades and identified only a handful of authors – notably Philip K. Michel Faber’s novel, Under the Skin (2000), was that rarest of beasts: a science fiction story with real literary merit.
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