The 10 best films of 2014: No 1 – Under the Skin | Film | The Guardian

The 10 best films of 2014: No 1 – Under the Skin

By turns breathtaking, hilarious and disturbing, Jonathan Glazer's extraordinary, erotic film achieves a rare blend of fantasy and realism 'Very erotic, very scary' – read Peter Bradshaw's review of Under the Skin Interview: Scarlett Johansson discusses her role in Under the Skin

Terminally tempting: Scarlett Johansson in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin

Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin is a film about a beautiful, scary alien that is itself beautiful and scary and alien: it's an entirely extraordinary, outrageously sensual film that Glazer's previous excellent work had really only hinted at, partially and indistinctly. His Sexy Beast (2000) was a visually accomplished, exciting and intelligent crime thriller that was way ahead of the woeful mockney-geezer mode of the time. Birth (2004) had Kubrickian ingenuity and chill, with some remarkable moments; it was a movie that deserves cult-classic status but has yet to achieve it. Then a decade went by, and it seemed that Glazer might be a stylist for whom a sustained cinema career would perhaps not be achievable (and heaven knows, it can happen to the most talented).
But when he gave us his long-gestating free adaptation of Michel Faber's novel Under the Skin, the result really was gasp-inducing: hilarious, disturbing, audacious. No less an A-lister than Scarlett Johansson plays an alien in human form who roams the streets and shopping malls of Glasgow. Perfectly genuine footage of real-life passersby is shown as the incognito Johansson impassively sizes up these earthlings for their calorific value. Then actors will step out of the crowd for their scenes with the great seducer. She takes them back to her place: a mysterious dark cavern in which, in an erotic trance, they submit to being imprisoned and farmed for their meat – and perhaps, who knows, for their very soul.

Glazer surely took something, again, from Kubrick, especially in the scene in which his alien is born in some dimensionless otherworld. He took something from Nic Roeg and The Man Who Fell to Earth and a little, perhaps, from David Lynch – of which, more in a moment. But alongside the sci-fi exoticism he brought the grit and sinew of contemporary realism, calling to mind the work of film-makers like Ken Loach, or even Abbas Kiarostami and the opening of his The Taste of Cherry, in which a desperately unhappy man drives around the itinerant labour markets of Teheran looking for someone to help him. These fantastic alien forms are scuffed with ordinariness and even bathos. The scene in which the alien uncomprehendingly watches Tommy Cooper on television is a masterpiece of tonal suspense.

Watching Under the Skin again brought to mind another comparison: Orson Welles – the Welles who succeeded in creating a hoax martian invasion on the radio and who, in F for Fake (1975), got his partner Oja Kodar to walk around the streets in a miniskirt, secretly filming the lascivious expressions of the non-actor guys looking at her.

Out there ... Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin Photograph: Allstar/FILM4/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

The most staggering scene is, of course, that in which the alien picks up a young man with the facial condition neurofibromatosis, played by Adam Pearson. Glazer brings to this scene an utter fearlessness and unsentimentality, perhaps a variation on a theme from David Lynch's The Elephant Man. The alien does not essentially distinguish between his looks and those of her other victims, but her encounter with him – an encounter of two aliens? – triggers a crisis in which she becomes the prey rather than the hunter.

Under the Skin is just so visually free and uninhibited that there is an intense dark, destructive sexiness in everything about it – quite apart from the hilarious, bizarre, mesmeric eroticism of the film itself. It is a work of subcutaneous potency. It gets under your skin.

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