Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Under the Skin
2014 · Jonathan Glazer · Under the Skin on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch her face behind the windscreen as men walk past. (performance)
Daniel Landin keeps the camera close inside the van with the wet city sliding over the glass. Johansson reads each man and nothing moves in her face. No want, no pity, only assessment.
Payoff: The point of view you have been handed is not a human one, and the film settles that before a word. In the reading: icon of quality. The reading calls this a qualisign: a still reflecting face holding one quality, here watchfulness and almost nothing else.
Notice the grainy street footage of real passers-by. (camera)
Glazer hid small cameras in the van and around Glasgow and filmed Johansson approaching men who had no idea. Available light, overcast, no glamour. Those reactions are genuinely unrehearsed.
Payoff: The coldness is not a style laid over the world. It is what a lens catches when nobody is performing. In the reading: engramme / photogramme. The reading calls this the gramme: the camera as pure matter, the world filming itself with nobody behind the lens.
Listen for the detuned strings crawling under the pickup scenes. (sound)
Mica Levi built the score from violas slowed and processed into something insectile. It throbs during the hunting and turns into a queasy pulse in the void. Dialogue is sparse and often hard to catch.
Payoff: The music hands you the inside of a creature whose face is giving you nothing at all.
Watch the men walk forward into the black room. (staging)
The seductions end in an inky space with no walls, where a transfixed man undresses, keeps walking, and sinks through a reflective surface. No explanation of any of it is ever offered.
Payoff: Under the ordinary Glasgow streets sits a place of pure appetite with no psychology attached to it. In the reading: originary world. The reading calls that void an originary world: appetite without explanation, lying underneath the ordinary social surface.
Count how long a shot holds after its point lands. (cutting)
Paul Watts holds faces and landscapes well past comfort. The early stretch runs as a repeating procedure: spot a lone man, talk, drive, harvest, start again. The rhythm is deliberate and hypnotic.
Payoff: The repetition teaches you the routine, which is what lets you feel it when the routine begins to break.
Once you have seen it
Watch her face during the scene with Adam Pearson. (performance)
The film has treated faces as bait for an hour. Here it turns to his with sudden tenderness and holds. Nothing in her method visibly changes, and everything after it is different.
Payoff: A predator registers another person for the first time, and the engine driving the film stops working from that point.
Track what she does once she stops hunting. (structure)
She wanders the Highlands, tries a slice of cake and gags it back up, lets herself be touched. None of it advances a plot. She can only look and put up with what happens.
Payoff: The second half drifts on purpose, because the routine that powered the first half is gone and nothing takes its place.
Watch who is doing the looking in the last act. (structure)
For an hour she studies men through glass. In the forest the watching reverses and she becomes the one followed, studied, and handled. The skin she has been wearing stops protecting her.
Payoff: The hunter ends as the object, which is the film turning its own way of looking back on itself.
Carry this in: Watch her face. The film runs on how little it gives you, and on the moment that finally changes.