Femme fatality

Scarlett Johansson, an enticing voice without a body in Her, is an enticing body without a soul for much of Under the Skin. When the rudiments of soul begin to show up, it’s a crisis for the character and a compounded irony for the plot of this movie’s paradoxical foray into sci-fi.

The central premise involves an alien who, disguised in the body of an attractive female (Johansson in black hair and fur jacket), trolls the back streets of a Scottish town (in a van) looking for men. And those whom she entices into the van and seduces are harvested for their bodies.

As such, she’s sort of an extra-terrestrial femme fatale, but one of the film’s recurring notions suggests that there is an element of fatality in all human desire, including that which apparently accompanies her borrowed flesh. And so Under the Skin also takes shape as a chilly, sexy, ironic parable about the paradoxes and ambiguities of human nature.

Johansson does nice understated work with the femme fatale’s lack of empathy and with empathy’s tentative emergence as well. In a drowning incident involving young parents and an infant, the alien seductress seems very detached but not at all malevolent. And in a scene in which she is sexually assaulted, she seems both angry and perplexed, rather as if what she has begun to experience is alarming but also fascinating and well-nigh indelible.

The film’s semi-surrealist special effects have a weird sublimity to them as well. And the paradoxes are ubiquitous. The alien’s fateful encounter with a peculiar park ranger feels like some sort of half-stoned horror film, and her weirdly unpredictable encounter with a deformed-looking man evokes the fractured kind of humanism that is rarely seen outside the films of Luis Buñuel or David Lynch.