Under the Skin · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the face. She drives a white van through Glasgow in the rain, and the camera sits close, behind the windscreen, where the wet city slides over the glass. She is watching men. They cross in front of her and she reads them the way you'd read a price tag — nothing moves in the face, no want, no pity. This is the image the whole film is built from, and before a single word it tells you the point of view you've been handed is not a human one.

Deleuze, following the philosopher Bergson, dreamed of a cinema-vision cut loose from any human center: the camera-eye as pure matter, the world filming itself with nobody home behind the lens. He called the most radical version the engramme (the gramme). Glazer gives it a body. Johansson's alien perceives without human interiority, and Daniel Landin's camera takes on her studying, affectless gaze, so that humanity arrives onscreen as specimen — overheard in near-unintelligible Scottish accents, observed rather than understood. The hidden-camera street footage is the proof. Those are real men, filmed before they knew it, approached for releases only afterward. The film's coldness isn't a style laid over the world. It's the world caught by a lens that doesn't care.

Then there is the face itself. Deleuze named the close-up the affection-image: a feeling registered on a face but not yet spent in action. Its purest form, the qualisign, is an immobile reflecting face holding a single quality — and Johansson's holds watchfulness, almost nothing else. Her smile is a tool she has learned to deploy. The performance works by subtraction; we keep leaning into the face for an emotion that isn't there. That grammar comes straight from Persona — Bergman's near-blank women, identity dissolving through a held stare — just as the casting of a pop icon as a literally alien body reworks Bowie in Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Where does she take them? Into a black void, where the transfixed men walk forward and sink into a reflective liquid. Deleuze has a logic for what's underneath this. Beneath the ordinary social surface — the derived milieu, here the precincts, laybys and nightclubs of an actual Glasgow — naturalism finds an originary world of pure drive, appetite without psychology or explanation. The void is that originary world made literal: no biology, no stated purpose, just harvesting and the slope toward death. This is the impulse-image, and its native direction is down. (The black abstraction is the inheritance of 2001's Stargate — meaning carried by image and sound alone, exposition refused.)

Then the film breaks, and the break is the most Deleuzian thing about it. For its first half it runs as a sensory-motor circuit at procedural full power: perceive a solitary man, act, harvest, repeat. The whole history Deleuze tells turns on the moment that circuit fails — the crisis of the action-image, where a character can no longer react adequately to what she perceives and action stops resolving anything. Here it has a precise trigger. She lures Adam Pearson's lonely, disfigured man, and then spares him; the film, which had been treating faces as bait, turns to his face with sudden unbearable tenderness, and she abandons the hunt. After that, nothing she does advances a plot. She wanders the Highlands. She tries a slice of cake and gags it back up. She lets herself be touched. This is the voyage-balade, the trip that transforms nothing — the drifting, opaque protagonist Antonioni built The Passenger around, dropped into real landscape and patient observation.

The hunter becomes a watcher — Deleuze's seer (voyant), who can only look and endure because no action is left available. The film thins into pure optical and sound situations, and Mica Levi's score takes over as its center of gravity: violas slowed and detuned, insectile during the predation, then a queasy interior pulse. The music is the alien's senscorium made audible, the inside she has no words for. We are given as sound the interiority the image withholds.

And the spaces empty out. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is a place that has stopped serving as a setting for action — voided, indifferent, affective in itself. The black harvesting room is one pole of it; the vast grey Highlands, beautiful and uncaring, are the other. Stalker's rule-bound zone, crossed slowly, taught Glazer this hypnotic tempo, this attention to material surface.

What the second half is really studying is a body. This becomes a cinema of the body — embodiment carried by posture and attitude rather than plot: the body she inhabits but does not possess, learning to eat, to be looked at, to be wanted as a human is wanted. It kills her. A forestry worker attempts to rape her; her human skin tears, the black form shows through, and he burns her in the snow. Smoke rises into an indifferent sky. The predator falls to victim, undone by the very humanity she approached.

What did this do to film? It proved an English-language star vehicle could be pure sensory cinema — exposition refused entirely, meaning carried by face, void and viola — and it handed the A24 decade its template for dread. Watch it again and notice when you stop being shown a monster and start being asked to inhabit one. The horror isn't that she has no feelings. It's the moment, late, when you realize she's beginning to, and that feeling is what gets her killed. What is it, exactly, that we are watching learn to be human — and why does it look so much like watching ourselves?