In stark contrast, such rough-and-ready sequences sit alongside extraordinarily elegant and evocative FX tableaux that combine the shock factor of Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake (bodies disintegrating from the inside) with the serenity of artist Richard Wilson's breathtaking installation 20:50 (vast pools of oil that appear solid, but threaten to engulf) as aroused men disappear into the cosmic void.Įlsewhere, the tone veers between stark horror (Johansson's blank reaction to a beach-bound family tragedy) and dawning sympathy (an encounter with a young man with neurofibromatosis challenges perceptions of beauty and ugliness), with the spectre of cosmic loneliness gnawing away at the edges of the frame. In an audacious, if not wholly successful move, Johansson's kerb-crawling adventures were shot with hidden lenses, unwitting non-professionals being lured into conversation – and indeed into a white van – by an unrecognised icon in otherworldly surroundings (a Hollywood star on Sauchiehall Street), their natural reactions caught Candid Camera-style.

While the source takes pointedly satirical swipes at a range of human targets, from sexuality to factory farming, Glazer and co-writer Walter Campbell conjure a sparse, elliptical fable that bizarrely juxtaposes scenes of highly orchestrated fantasy with on-the-hoof realism to disorienting effect. Jonathan Glazer, director of Sexy Beast and Birth, spent nine years, off and on, struggling to distil the essence of Faber's novel, working through several drafts (and, indeed, writers) before arriving at a version that strips things right back to the bone. But time spent inhabiting human form appears to have a price, and as alienation turns to something resembling empathy, so vulnerability rears its head, and our voracious visitor begins to lose her mission control. With a brilliant blend of abstraction and precision, this sequence establishes a tension between the intergalactic and the earthly that underwrites the subsequent narrative an eerie tale of a space traveller inhabiting human form, prowling the streets of Glasgow in search of raw flesh.Īs the alt/indie descendant of Natasha Henstridge in Species, Scarlett Johansson is initially predatory, her clipped English vowels and thousand-yard stare effectively suggesting an imitation of life, an act refined to lure male prey like the finely wound fly-fishing ties about which Stellan Skarsgård waxes lyrical in Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac. From here we move, via kaleidoscopic invention, to an image of an eye a constructed gaze, human on the outside, alien on the inside – inner space from outer space.

T his bold, flawed and admirably out-there adaptation of Michel Faber's 2000 novel about an extraterrestrial stalker opens with a pinpoint of light that may be a distant twinkling star or an approaching headlight – it's impossible to tell.

Michel faber under the skin review