Welcome to the Movie Club! Today’s movie is Jonathan Glazer’s science fiction film Under the Skin!
Under the Skin is based on the novel of the same name by Michel Faber, but strips its plots down to its barebones. Both follow an alien, played by Scarlett Johansson, who comes to earth disguised as a woman that seduces men and lures them into an inky pool in a dark room, but over time starts to learn more about herself and humanity.
After festival screenings and a premiere at TIFF in 2013, Under the Skin was theatrically released first in the UK on March 14, 2014, and then in the US on April 4, 2014.1 It was well-received by critics, earning an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes, but was a box office bomb, earning only $7.2 million against a budget of $13.3 million.23
- It took around a decade to make the film, as Jonathon Glazer worked on different versions of the script, eventually cutting out dozens of pages and paring it down from something intended to have a much higher budget with a lot of special effects.
- Many of the scenes in which Scarlett Johansson interacts with strangers were shot with non-actors using hidden cameras.
- This is how production designer Chris Oddy describes how they created the black room set: “The floor that they’re walking on was a complete reflection. We had a tank set in the floor of the stage surrounded by black glass and then a mechanism in the tank to lower the victim into the floor on camera. And then a system within it to counteract the overflow. Obviously if you put something in a liquid bath, you get the Archimedes effect and the liquid overflows so there was something in the tank that diminished at the same rate that the person was going in.”
What did you think? Share your thoughts below!
Up Next: Our next movie is a filmed version of Spalding Gray’s monologue, Monster in a Box, directed by Nick Broomfield. This is a bit of an odd case as it is not available to stream, officially, anywhere, but thankfully someone has uploaded it to YouTube:
- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1441395/releaseinfo/ ↩︎
- https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/under_the_skin_2013 ↩︎
- https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Under-the-Skin#tab=summary ↩︎
- https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/06/under-the-skin-director-jonathan-glazer-scarlett-johansson ↩︎
- https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/19225/1/behind-the-scenes-of-under-the-skin ↩︎