The Playlist Top 20 Movies of 2014
1. "Under the Skin"
“There are more things in heaven and earth,” as Hamlet says to Horatio, “than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” And Jonathan Glazer’s bewitching “Under the Skin” may be the best expression ever of a film told from the point of view of one of those things.
Profoundly, chillingly alien, Glazer’s uncanny masterpiece feels like it’s animated by an unearthly intelligence, the kind of dark, still watchfulness that is perhaps closest in spirit to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” -- a perspective that feels simply not-human. So often, when dealing with alien lifeforms in film, we ascribe to them conventional human morality -- they are good or bad, vengeful or merciful, evil or pure. But
Scarlett Johansson gives an immaculate performance as a creature that simply exists outside that framework, perfectly ambivalent, unmotivated by notions of justice or revenge, only opportunity. At least at the outset, because as the film unfolds, the terrible perfection of her alien design (she is like an elaborate lure, cast by the man on the motorcycle, perhaps) is gradually compromised by the distant stirrings of a kind of humanity: pity, appetite, vanity, gratitude, fear. And all this couched within that remarkable score -- all fetal heartbeats, vertiginous strings and amniotic pulsations -- and some of the most striking imagery that master stylist Glazer has ever created, the more startling for being set amid the humdrum surroundings of Glaswegian high streets and gray Scottish countryside. It’s that push-pull of the beyond-our-ken and the banal that makes “Under the Skin” such a singular film (a man is bringing an alien home, but he still checks the eggs before buying them) and an example of laser-focussed directorial confidence and intent, albeit loosely based on Michael Faber’s novel.
Sitting at our number one spot for the year by an enormous margin, mysterious, hypnotic and completely terrifying (is there any scene more eerily unheimlich than Johansson dragging that swimmer’s body past the crying baby on the beach?) the film earns its title not so much for any thematic answers it provides (it remains, to the last a perfectly sealed enigma) but because for its admirers
"under the skin" is where it lives, now and probably forever.
Iggy will probably win it, Bang Bang is just way too calculated to give her a hit in her otherwise fading career (and give her labelmates some extra promo).
