Under the Skin (2013) – Most boring film I’ve ever seen, second worst film

I feel bad that I’m not art housey enough to “get” films like Under the Skin. I would like to believe that I’m “sophisticated enough” for artsy movies… Well, I can tell you that I obviously am not. This movie apparently gets rave reviews and is considered “very artistic” and an “intellectual puzzle”. The scenery was Meh in most cases, the cinematography is also very Meh. I’ve seen some movies where most scenes are set up to be individual “paintings” of sorts – where great effort and pain was put into lighting, focus, distance, relational position of the objects and the actors to each other, and movement in the cut, and each scene was just a beautiful moving picture… but that is not what Under the Skin is. At all. I picked apart the scenes trying to find the ART in this “art house” movie I struggled to enjoy, and it wasn’t there, not in terms of the way I’ve ever known fine art to be judged. I had far more than enough time to analyze almost every single shot, as the movie trudges along at a pace that would bore a snail – the director lingers, and I mean fucking LINGERS on every scene where absolutely nothing is going on – so I figured it was for visual presence of something beautiful, or striking, or thought provoking. Nope. Just some places in Scotland. A club. A beach. A forest. A whatever. Just… boring places. And Scarlet Johansson? Seriously? Her accent is laughably bad in what few lines she has and she’s utterly blank the entire movie. It’s like watching a Real Doll come to life. “So, let’s use her as monster-rape-bait for otherwise innocent guys (as far as we know, minus the last guy), to lure guys into black goop.” What? Huh? So, she’s supposed to be an alien, and we’re supposed to pretend this is how an alien would experience our world?

Speaking of rape bait – I read a number of pieces online about the movie (trying to figure wtf I missed) and reverse rape was often cited as a core reason the movie was so interesting. I’ll give it that, that part of the plot is unique I guess, but I doubt it’s the first movie to go this way with the theme (hell even the end of Death Proof has a “YOU GO GIRL!” moment, and almost all horror movies have the female protagonist skewered, smooshed, or burnt by the end of the film)… but it didn’t really provoke any conversation about the issue or challenge the ethics of date rape (which is basically what she did, it was more that than it was “parking lot stranger rape”), or the concepts of toxic masculinity. Nope. Just some… weird mannequin monster lady seducing elephant man and a few regular joes into tar, to implode them later (wtfh?)   And, y’know, I consider myself a fan of the artwork of Francis Bacon, because his paintings typically evoke some kind of primordial fear or feeling of retched disgust, or horror – without being anything specific… and the tiny bit of horror in this movie didn’t even go there. Like, it had five seconds of “oooo… spooky” effects, then lingered on a piece of cloth underwater for a solid 30 seconds. I know it was that long because I was watching it on VLC and I fast forwarded that shit. I had to hit fast forward three times! I won’t lie, by that point in the movie I was tapping fast foward through quite a bit of the rest of the film. I figured I had given it a fair shake and it was wasting my time.

There wasn’t any hint of ancient, unknowable horror, or sentient, intelligent race of invaders trying to learn who we are before an invasion or to merge with our species, or any of the other more recent Sci-Fi tropes. It was just a confused, low IQ seduction monster. The main character acted confused through 90% of the movie, more so than curious. As a scientist it baffles me when an “exploration” character is confused without any sense of curiosity. I don’t get that way of thinking, and that’s exactly how this character acts – confused as fuck, without actually being curious about the world around it or those that live in the world. It was just weirdly designed to seduce and trap (and kill?). Like a spider that doesn’t know wtf it is, or why it’s trapping flies, and eating them… “WHAT AM I, WHAT IS GOING ON?” Heh.

Anyway. Not quite as bad as The Blair Witch Project 2. Not quite that awful, but it’s most of the way there, and far more boring. Maybe if I wear skinny jeans, ironically thick glasses, flannel, canvas shoes, and oil up my beard a little (and curl the tips of my moustache!), grow out a man-bun, and sit down with a cup of fair trade artisanal coffee I can pretend it’s a good movie too.