Column Science Fiction Film Club Under the Skin: A Brilliant and Disturbing Alien Point of View This film is a perfect distillation of everything I love about alien-on-Earth stories. By Kali Wallace | Published on February 25, 2026 Credit: StudioCanal/A24 Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: StudioCanal/A24 Under the Skin (2013) Directed by Jonathan Glazer. Written by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel of the same name by Michel Faber. Starring Scarlett Johansson. In her 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard describes walking along a creek looking for frogs. She finds one that doesn’t startle and jump away as she expects. It doesn’t move at all, and as she watches something peculiar happens: “And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football.” The frog is being devoured by a giant water bug (Lethocerus americanus), an aquatic insect that hunts by injecting digestive enzymes into its prey and sucking out the liquified insides. Like many American high school students, I read this well-known and oft-quoted passage in English class long before I read the rest of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I don’t know how other students reacted to it, but I was instantly enamored. Not with giant water bugs—I don’t think I’ve ever met one, I’m sure they’re very nice bugs—but with the descriptive writing in those few paragraphs. The matter-of-fact clarity and vivid similes with which Dillard describes the scene, the tone that carries a muted sense of both awe and horror, the acknowledgement that parts of the world can be both very natural and totally alien to everyday human experience—all of this lodged in my brain and never let go. It sits there among the small number of specific pieces of writing that made me want to be a writer. I kept thinking about the giant water bug while I was watching Under the Skin. Mostly, yes, because of the eerie, amazing scene where the aliens give the giant water bug treatment to one of their human victims and suck his insides out in a slurry to leave a floating, folding, weirdly graceful skin husk behind. But it’s also because the film made me think both “I’m fascinated by how this movie is telling its story” and “I want to learn how to do that.” I hadn’t seen Under the Skin before watching it for this column, because I had somehow gotten the impression that it was more of a traditional horror film. I’m not sure where I got that idea, but it was wrong. The film is deeply, deeply unsettling, but it’s not scary in the way that jump-scare horror movies are. It’s also brilliant. Several critics have called it a masterpiece, and I’m inclined to agree that it deserves that designation. It’s beautiful and strange and unnerving. It’s so very good. I’m glad I finally watched it. The movie is a very loose adaptation of the novel Under the Skin by Michel Faber, which I haven’t read. It didn’t start out as a loose adaptation; it started out as something a lot closer to the book. Jonathan Glazer read an early and very faithful script in 2004, a few years after the book was published. In an interview with The Guardian for the film’s 2014 release, he described his reaction: “I knew then that I absolutely didn’t want to film the book. But I still wanted to make the book a film.” That’s an interesting distinction, and it helps explain why it took so long for the film to come together. Glazer first worked with screenwriter Milo Addica (with whom he had collaborated on his 2004 film Birth), but eventually he began working with Walter Campbell, who isn’t a feature film screenwriter at all but somebody Glazer had worked with in his other filmmaking career: advertising. Because Under the Skin was a much buzzed-about critical favorite, and because Glazer’s 2023 film The Zone of Interest won an Academy Award, it’s easy to forget that he really only makes movies about once a decade. The bulk of his work has been in advertising and music videos; examples include the famous Guinness “Surfer” commercial and music videos for Blur’s “The Universal” and Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity.” Glazer and Campbell rewrote the script several times, and after a certain point they weren’t really adapting the novel at all. Campbell has said he never even read it. And they certainly never consulted with Faber, although according to Campbell somebody involved in the rights deal read the script and said, “Oh, I really love it. And I also love the fact that I can still sell the rights to Under the Skin.”   Before you get angry on the author’s behalf, it’s important to note that while Faber hasn’t said much about the film over the years, what little he has said makes it clear that he views adaptation as an act of creating a wholly separate work, and he doesn’t feel remotely precious about or slighted by the film’s approach. In a 2014 interview he said, “A mediocre or weak adaptation that tried to be faithful would have upset me; a strong adaptation that took wild liberties made me very happy.” And he went on to emphasize his point: “For me, the ideal book-into-film adaptation of all time was Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Ruthlessly unfaithful and yet true to the essence.” I don’t know if Under the Skin qualifies as “ruthlessly unfaithful.” From the bits I’ve read of the book and the synopsis it doesn’t seem to go quite as far as something like Apocalypse Now. What it does is pare the premise down to its bones and leave a very lean, ambiguous story in its place. The book is explicitly about extraterrestrials from a stratified corporate society who come to Earth to harvest humans for food, focusing on one alien character whose views on this work change as she does it. The movie not only removes any details about the alien society, but it removes all of the science fictional context to focus instead, minutely and obsessively, on a single character’s perspective as an outside observer in the human world. That character, played by Scarlett Johannson, doesn’t have a name. None of the characters have names. We don’t know if this is her job. We don’t even really know if she’s an alien, where she comes from, how she got here, what she wants. It’s not a great leap of logic to assume she’s hunting her victims for food, although it’s never stated outright. There’s a lot of implication and a lot of suggestion between the film’s very limited dialogue, but nothing is explained—and the film is all the more powerful for it. Any explication would detract from the film’s impact, because this is not a movie designed to let sci fi fans feel clever while deciphering the worldbuilding. It’s a film designed to make the audience feel very, very uncomfortable. Under the Skin was also filmed in an unusual way, or at least an unusual way for a movie that stars one of the most recognizable actors in the business. (Under the Skin premiered at festivals in 2013, but in 2014 it went into wide release on the exact same day as Captain America: The Winter Soldier.) Because Glazer and cinematographer Daniel Landin wanted to capture natural reactions to Johannson’s character approaching men on random roadsides, they filmed those prowling scenes with hidden cameras and unsuspecting members of the public. They built cameras into the van and hid the film crew in the back while Johannson drove around Glasgow. Sometimes Glazer would point out somebody for her to approach; sometimes she would veto the choice and approach somebody else instead. The film crew let her decide where to drive and how to start the conversations, and apparently she was almost never recognized, which is a fine demonstration of humankind’s impressive inability to recognize famous faces out of context. Glazer, who is English, has also joked that Johannson, who is American but was using an English accent, was much better at understanding the strongest Scottish accents, so he wasn’t even always sure what they were saying. That’s almost certainly a humorous exaggeration, but I like the idea of a director crouched awkwardly in the back of an unmarked van while his lead actor carries on conversations he only partly follows. Similarly, many of the scenes where the character is moving through public places, such as walking through the shopping center or tripping and falling on the street, were filmed with hidden cameras and members of the public. In the shopping center, they put the camera in a mop bucket to follow Johannson as she walked along. The purpose was to capture ordinary people reacting to the character in ordinary human environments, not extras on a controlled set being told how to act. After the initial approach and interaction, they did, of course, tell the participants what was going on and explain what would be expected if they were to be in the film. And there are a few professional actors in the movie, such as Kryštof Hádek as the swimmer at the beach and Paul Brannigan as the man in the club. Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis that results in facial tumors, had worked in television as a presenter and researcher, but Under the Skin was his first acting role. When casting the other alien hunter, they didn’t need him to say anything, they just needed him to look intimidating and drive a motorcycle around the rainy Scottish countryside safely, so they brought on professional racer Jeremy McWilliams. Dave Acton, who plays the forestry worker who assaults Johansson’s character at the end of the film, was actually the owner of a plot of land near Loch Lomond where some of those scenes were filmed. In a short clip from the film’s Blu-ray release, casting director Kathleen Crawford talks about working with Acton to get a non-actor comfortable with filming such violent scenes. (The bothy itself is Rowchoish Bothy on the West Highlands Way.) (You now have “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond” stuck in your head but I’m not sorry.) Under the Skin doesn’t look or feel like a film filled with candid scenes and amateurs. It’s a very polished, deliberate, thoughtful film, with beautiful cinematography and a deliberate, fully realized atmosphere. There are also artful practical effects in those creepy black room scenes, which they filmed using a lot of on-set trickery, lighting, and darkness, while having the men actually walk down steps into a filled pool. So the goal of the hidden cameras and non-actor cast members was not to mimic a documentary or cinéma vérité style of observational filmmaking. The movie isn’t trying to make the audience feel as though we are a fly on the wall watching events unfold. What it’s doing instead is centering us in the point-of-view of this character, this alien who has quite literally donned a human suit in order to hunt humans, and all that entails—which is quite a lot. It matters that she moves through the world as an exceptionally beautiful woman picking up men, because her tactics are dependent on certain assumptions about who gets to move safely through the world and who does not. She knows what questions to ask to determine if a man has people who will notice he’s missing, but the way she asks them is not quite natural. She’s reciting practiced conversation prompts and being a bit awkwardly invasive about it. It shouldn’t work, just as bringing the men to a damp, disgusting abandoned house for sex shouldn’t work, but the human suit she’s wearing does not present as a threat to the men she targets. The scenes that most firmly establishes the alienness happen quite early in the film. They are also my favorite scenes, because they’re among the best scenes I’ve seen in any film, and the most disturbing. I’m talking about the sequence of events at the beach, when Johannson’s character is talking to a lone man (Kryštof Hádek) to size him up as a victim. Elsewhere on the beach two parents and a baby are enjoying what looks like a fairly normal day out, but things take a dangerous turn when the woman (Alison Chand) races into the dangerous surf to rescue the family dog. The man (Roy Armstrong) tries to swim after her, and when he struggles the swimmer (Hádek) tries to rescue him. But the man runs right back into the water, and both parents drown. Johannson’s character watches all of this from a distance, with no visible emotion or reaction. When the swimmer crawls back to shore, she hits him with a rock to kill him and drags his body toward her van. That’s what she came here for, after all, and the deaths of two people were only a distraction. She doesn’t spare a glance for the couple’s baby, now left alone on the beach. Nor does her motorcycle-riding fellow hunter (McWilliams) when he returns to the beach that night to clean up. Neither of them reacts to the crying child at all. There is only cold indifference, which forces us, the audience, to helplessly watch events play out while all of our instincts are screaming against what’s happening in screen. These are brilliant scenes. There’s minimal violence and no gore, and the impact is all the more powerful for it. It’s immediately disorienting, because even if we are complete inured to the kind of violence that comes from adults luring other adults into vans, we aren’t expecting this. We’re now firmly in the alien perspective, and we hate it. We just want somebody to help that baby. (For the record: The baby was unharmed in real life. I didn’t even realize that was a concern people had until I saw some of the most bizarre online arguments in decade-old comment threads.) That scene serves as a starting point, and the rest of the movie follows along as the character wears the human suit for so long she starts looking into the mirror and doubting what she sees. That’s when things begin to falter. She meets Pearson’s character, who is treated inhumanely by other humans, and can’t bring herself to kill him. She lets him go and tries to abandon the hunt. She tries to be human for a while. Tries mundane human experiences: eating food, riding the bus, watching TV, having sex. The trial fails, of course. It was doomed before it really began. She can’t eat what humans eat. Nothing inside her human suit has changed except for how she feels, and that’s not enough. Outside of the controlled environment of her van and the encounters she engineers, she’s vulnerable to a very common human predator: a man who sees women as objects for his sexual gratification. The ending is sad, quiet, and inevitable. I love this movie. I love everything about it. It’s brilliant, it’s upsetting, and it’s so, so well made. It’s a perfect distillation of everything I love about alien-on-Earth stories, with the unfamiliar perspective, the isolation, the strangeness. It’s about both observing humans and being human, about the assumptions we make and the violence we live with and the imperfect rituals we perform when we interact. All art is, on some level, about humanity examining and attempting to understand ourselves, and I love that this film embraces that theme without trying to offer any easy, comforting answers or explanations. What do you think about Under the Skin? How does it sit in relation to the other movies we’ve watched about alien visitors among us? Does anybody who’s read the book have thoughts on this type of adaptation?[end-mark] March Moon Madness Sci fi movies have been going to the Moon since the very earliest days of cinema, so we’re going to do a little survey of Moon visits throughout the month of March. March 4 — Woman in the Moon (1929), directed by Fritz Lang This is the movie that Lang made between the more famous Metropolis and M. It’s about going to the Moon. Watch it online, plus a quick search brings up several alternative uploads. Watch a clip here. March 11 — Destination Moon (1950), directed by George Pal This one is also about going to the Moon. Watch it online. View the trailer. March 18 — First Men in the Moon (1964), directed by Nathan Juran You’re not going to believe it: This is about going to the Moon, this time with creatures made by Ray Harryhausen. Watch it online. Trailer. March 25 — Moon (2009), directed by Duncan Jones This one is not about going to the Moon. It’s about already being Sam Rockwell on the Moon and thinking you get to leave soon when things turn… weird. Watch it online. Trailer. The post <i>Under the Skin</i>: A Brilliant and Disturbing Alien Point of View appeared first on Reactor.