How do you make Scarlett Johansson disappear? If you’re Jonathan Glazer, a mercurial British filmmaker of singular skill and vision, you do very little. The magic trick isn’t the result of make-up or a disguise, but of context. For Under the Skin, his existential extra-terrestrial 2013 masterpiece, it meant sending Johansson to a Glaswegian shopping centre, where she’d hunt for clothes at Next and ask for help in finding the nearest Asda. It’s the most alien thing about a movie all about one.
The film, regularly chosen as the best British films of the 21st century, is screening at London’s ICA next week (24 October) as part of the Celebrating Free Thinkers festival, marking The Independent’s 40th anniversary. Under the Skin is based on a novel, published in 2000, by Michel Faber. His heroine is an alien with the name of Isserley, who is beamed to Earth from her home planet and tasked with harvesting human flesh, as it’s a delicacy among the wealthy alien overlords she works for. Over the course of Faber’s book, other aliens arrive on Earth and disrupt Isserley’s mission, and she grows disturbed by the ease with which they kill.
