You are wearing skin. It fits well enough. The face in the mirror is symmetrical, dark-haired, attractive by the standards of this species. You know this because you were given this face for a reason. The reason is the van.

You drive. Glasgow moves past you in grey and orange. You do not know this city. You do not know any city. But you know what you are looking for. Men. Alone. Walking at night. You pull the van over and you ask them questions. Simple questions. Where are you going? Do you have family? Is anyone expecting you?

You are selecting for isolation. You are looking for people no one will miss.

This is the surface of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, and it already feels like nothing you’ve seen before. Scarlett Johansson drives a van through real streets, speaking to real men, and many of them have no idea they are in a film. Hidden cameras capture their faces as they lean into the window, flattered, confused, hopeful. They are talking to a movie star and they don’t know it. They are talking to a predator and they don’t know that either.

You take them home. Home is a dark room. You walk forward. You undress, slowly, deliberately. They follow. Of course they follow. They are watching you and they do not notice that their feet are sinking. The floor is not a floor. It is a surface, black and reflective as obsidian, and it swallows them one step at a time. They sink to their chests. Their waists. Their necks. They do not scream. They are still looking at you. Desire has made them blind to the fact that they are drowning.

Beneath the surface, they float in darkness. Their bodies are suspended in a black liquid that slowly, silently consumes them from the inside. What remains is skin. Empty skin, drifting like a discarded glove. You do not watch this part. You are already driving again.

Mica Levi’s score follows you everywhere. It is not music in any comforting sense. It is strings pulled to the point of breaking. It is a vibration that sits behind your teeth. It is the sound of something pretending to be human and almost succeeding.

You find another man. And another. The routine holds. The van. The questions. The dark room. The sinking floor.

Then you find him.

He is walking alone at night. His face is different from the others. He has neurofibromatosis. His features are swollen, asymmetrical. He has never been picked up by a woman in a van before. He tells you this. He is nervous. He is gentle. He cannot believe this is happening.

You take him to the dark room. He follows you. He begins to sink.

And something shifts.

Glazer does not explain what changes. There is no dialogue, no revelation, no moment of eye contact that signals empathy. But you release him. You let him go. He stumbles out into the night, naked, confused, alive. You have broken your own pattern. You do not know why.

This is the hinge of the film. Everything before it is predation. Everything after it is something else. Not redemption. Not guilt. Something you don’t have a word for, because you don’t have words for anything. You have instructions, and you’ve just stopped following them.

You leave Glasgow. You drive north. Scotland changes around you. The buildings disappear. The land opens up. Forests. Hills. Fog so thick it erases the road. You are moving toward something or away from something and you cannot tell the difference.

You try to eat. A piece of cake in a restaurant. It sits in your mouth like a stone. You spit it out. This body can perform desire but it cannot perform satisfaction. It can attract but it cannot receive. You are wearing a suit designed for one function and you are trying to use it for another.

You meet a man. A kind man. He takes you in. He is patient. He asks nothing of you. One night, you try to have sex with him. You try to feel what the men in the van were feeling when they walked toward you and sank. It does not work. You stop. You look down at yourself. Something is wrong. Something has always been wrong.

You flee into the forest.

A logger finds you. He follows you. He tries to force himself on you. In the struggle, your skin tears. He pulls it back and sees what is underneath. Black. Smooth. Not human. Not anything he has a name for. You stare at him through the face that is now hanging loose around your skull. He runs. He comes back with petrol.

You burn.

The last shot is smoke rising through pine trees into a white sky. You are gone. The skin is gone. Scotland remains, vast and indifferent, as if you were never there.

This is Under the Skin. It is a film about an alien. It is also a film about what it feels like to live inside a body that does not belong to you. What it feels like to perform a gender you don’t understand. What it feels like to move through a world that sees your surface and nothing else. Johansson has never been better than she is here, and what makes her performance extraordinary is its emptiness. She is not playing a character. She is playing the absence of one. She is playing the space where a person should be.

Glazer made only three films in twenty years. Each one is a monolith. Sexy Beast. Birth. Under the Skin. He does not repeat himself. He does not explain himself. He builds worlds that feel complete and sealed, and then he leaves you locked inside them.

You will watch this film in the dark. You should. The darkness is where it lives. And when it ends, you will sit for a moment in the silence that follows, and you will feel the strange weight of your own skin. The way it fits. The way it doesn’t.

You are not from here either. None of us are. We just got better at pretending.

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Under the Skin Directed by Jonathan Glazer United Kingdom, 2013 | 108 minutes