Jason Barton

A stone-cold masterpiece; magisterial, and alien, like its protagonist. Jonathan Glazer accomplishes something never before depicted in cinema, parallelling the central character's alien intelligence, cinematically, by infusing every shot and scene w/ the same clinical, detached, inhuman perspective that Scarlett Johansson's character embodies. For those who claim otherwise, pay them no mind. Their failure to grasp "Under the Skin's" sublimity speaks to their own limitations - visual, experiential, intellectual - not the film's. Often, it takes years for audiences to catch up w/ transformative films: the exigencies of the box office and the time in which a film is made blinds audiences to their transcendence, as is the case here. "Vertigo" wasn't recognized as the greatest film of all time until decades afterward and it took critics a half-century - from 1975, the year of its release, to 2020, when it was named best film of all time by the British Film Institute - to recognize "Jeanne Dielman's" brilliance. "Under the Skin," is such a film, featuring two of the most horrifying sequences ever captured on camera; not conventional, cinematic violence, as in "Human Centipede," or "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (a masterpiece in its own right), but the existential horror that arises thru human inaction in the first instance, or the fragility of our existence, in the second. "Under the Skin" is transcendent cinema; a film to experience, ideally, on the big screen, where one can observe its horror - and its humanity - writ large, as Glazer intended.