The heartbreak of a subpar screen adaptation of a beloved novel is a feeling familiar to many, but less documented is the case of the underwhelming source material. Michel Faber’s “Under the Skin,” a strange science fiction novel about an alien driving around the Scottish Highlands, picking up hitchhikers and transporting them to farms to be fattened up and sold as meat, is one such example.
When I read Faber’s novel as part of a university course on utopian and dystopian literature, its film adaptation had already been long burned into my mind. My lecturer didn’t think much of Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film — I had similar feelings about the novel. I thought it was clunky and overwritten, barely recognisable from the minimalist masterpiece that had quickly joined the ranks of my all-time favourite films. Everything that was implied in the film was writ large in Faber’s book; the film’s mysterious, silent suggestiveness substituted for on-the-nose metaphors and didactic monologues.
In hindsight, I was probably a little harsh on Faber’s work, but only because the film, starring a magnificent Scarlett Johansson as the central anti-heroine, had completely changed my understanding of what narrative cinema can do. Until I saw Under the Skin, I had been a literary man with a passing interest in arthouse and independent cinema. The moment Glazer’s film came into my life, my eyes were opened to a language beyond the written or spoken word.
In Faber’s novel, an alien called Isserley travels around rural Scotland picking up male hitchhikers and drugging them with needles in the passenger seat of her car. She delivers her victims to her fellow ‘humans’ (her species calls itself human, while Earthlings are named “‘vodsels”’, similar to “voedsel”, meaning “food” in Faber’s native Dutch), who fatten them up before slaughtering them and selling their meat as food. Over time, Isserley has a crisis of faith. After learning to appreciate aspects of Earth life and enduring a sexual assault in the line of duty, she decides to go rogue. While transporting one last hitchhiker, Isserley crashes her car before pressing its inbuilt self-destruct button, killing her and destroying any evidence she was ever there.
Glazer’s film departs from the novel significantly, and even the retained elements are tweaked to suit his minimalist approach to storytelling. Scarlett Johansson plays an unnamed protagonist — for the purposes of this article she will be referred to as The Woman — who drives through the city of Glasgow in a large white van, the kind stereotypically associated with tradesmen. Like Isserley, she picks up lonely male wanderers, but leads them to a decrepit house, where, mesmerised by her sexual allure, they are unwittingly submerged in a mysterious black liquid. The Woman’s victims are also used for their flesh, though neither the final destination nor the utility of their remains are made clear.
After showing mercy to a man with neurofibromatosis (Adam Pearson), The Woman develops a taste for life on Earth. She goes through a number of difficult first experiences, where she attempts unsuccessfully to immerse herself in human society — a taste of cake, watching TV, sexual intimacy — before heading to the woods, where she is sexually assaulted by a logger who inadvertently discovers her true form lurking beneath the human façade. Revolted by what he has discovered, the logger douses The Woman in fuel and sets her alight, with her body, like Isserley’s in Faber’s novel, turning to ash and becoming one with the Earth.
The uneasy metamorphosis from book to film that has plagued many a literary adaptation is masterfully capitalised upon by Glazer, who recognises the shared challenge he and his main character face. Under the Skin is about transformation, of one creation disguising itself as — and eventually attempting to become — another similar but fundamentally different beast. The director plays with this theme in his subtle tweaking of the film’s plot details: in the novel, Isserley is forced to undergo surgery to make herself look like a vodsel, whereas The Woman is wearing her human body as a temporary disguise. Isserley’s rebellion comes from her disillusionment with her employers and their practices, while The Woman’s inner transformation is driven by curiosity, perhaps even a desire to become human completely. Faber’s Isserley resents her transformation and what it represents, Glazer’s Woman embraces hers.
Beyond plot details, Under the Skin achieves its own transformation through its unique visual language. With little computer-generated imagery and an abstract approach to its non-terrestrial settings, Glazer’s film oscillates between traditional British social realism and Jodorowsky-esque surrealism. In its premise, it shares similarities with classics such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Steven Spielberg’s ET, but rarely does science fiction look like this. The dimensionless white space where we meet The Woman and the black pool in which she captures her victims are a far cry from both the intricately described vodsel farms of the novel and the mesmeric spacecraft and terrains of traditional sci-fi cinema, distancing the film from generic convention and the limits of traditional representation.
If her world seems abstract and incomprehensible, then The Woman herself is a model citizen. With very little dialogue throughout the film, most of what we learn about The Woman is inferred from visual cues. This rejection of language as a signifier is in stark contrast to Faber’s wordy prose. In his novel, we get to know Isserley intimately, her thoughts and opinions on her vocation scrawled across every page:
In truth, there was for Isserley an addictive thrill about the challenge. She could have some magnificent brute sitting in her car, right next to her, knowing for sure that he was coming home with her, and she could already be thinking ahead to the next one. Even while she was admiring him, following the curves of his brawny shoulders or the swell of his chest under his T-shirt, savouring the thought of how superb he’d be once he was naked, she would keep one eye on the roadside, just in case an even better prospect was beckoning to her out there.
In several scenes equivalent to this passage, we watch The Woman drive around Glasgow in silence, no internal monologue, no narration, no talking to herself in the mirror. The only dialogue we hear is purely functional, such as her interrogations of potential targets or radio news broadcasts reporting on her victims’ disappearances. If The Woman feels the same “addictive thrill” that Isserley does, if she spends her time”‘admiring” her potential victims, she doesn’t show it. The mystery of who she is, where she comes from and what motivates her is left to us mere homosapiens to deduce for ourselves.
Isserley’s attempted redemption arc is far more explicit in the novel, too. Take this excerpt, in which she begins to sympathise with her victims after one writes out a message in the dirt:
Isserley considered the message, which was M E R C Y. It was a word she’d rarely encountered in her reading, and never on television. For an instant she racked her brains for a translation, then realized that, by sheer chance, the word was untranslatable into her own tongue; it was a concept that just didn’t exist.
The Woman of Glazer’s film has no such explicit confrontation with the idea of mercy, but she very clearly displays an understanding of the concept when she decides to release one of her victims. Her discovery of her own compassion is depicted through a silent scene in which she looks herself in the mirror before observing the plight of a fly trapped in a window. This is perhaps the best example of Glazer’s supreme ability to convert the literary into the filmic: what truer method is there of transforming a novel into the medium of cinema than by replacing its words with glances, its language with images?
And those are just the scripted parts. In perhaps the film’s most audacious move, many of the scenes depicting The Woman on the prowl take the form of a quasi-documentary. With a camera hidden in the front of her van, Johansson is seen flirting with actual men, that is to say non-actors, on Glasgow’s streets, none of them even realising who he is talking to. This was one of the elements of the film most discussed on its release, the incongruity of an A-list actor sizing up bona fide Hibernian fans making this at once the most daring and understated depiction of an extraterrestrial visiting Earth that cinema has ever seen. Were it not for the reverence with which Glazer has spoken of Faber’s novel, one would be forgiven for thinking that he is mocking his source material, or indeed the very idea of literature itself. “Look what I can do,” brags the camera, its limits defined not by the imagination of the artist, but by the endless spontaneous possibilities of real life.
Not only does the ingenious minimalism of Glazer’s film make it a successful adaptation, it is also one of the key reasons Under the Skin continues to resonate with us 10 years on, and will do so for decades to come. These fundamental building blocks give it a certain timeless quality; a film that is so ungenerous in its delivery of meaning and detail invites us to fill in the blanks and apply our respective interpretations to its scarcely painted canvas. How, then, might Under the Skin speak to us in 2023?
Early reactions very much centred on feminist readings of the film, including its apparent reversal of gendered power dynamics and explorations of rape culture. For Film Comment, Jonathan Romney described much of Under the Skin as a “rough-edged piece of realist cinema about a woman alone exploring an unfamiliar terrain,” while The Economist observed the “aggressive sexuality” of the film:”‘women seem very vulnerable but then men’s desires are punished.” This reading has only gained currency in the time since the film’s release, and Glazer’s film can be viewed as an investigation into the female gaze, a concept discussed only in certain circles in 2013 but since popularised by media such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. He is of course a male artist, and the film is undoubtedly influenced by his masculine perspective, but his focus on The Woman’s point of view — we literally view human life, female and male, through her eyes — marks the film as a discussion-worthy work in this still developing field.
Beyond art theory, real life events have given us plenty more to consider with regards to Under the Skin’s treatment of gender and humanity. On a re-watch of the film, I was struck by what a still-radical concept it is to have a woman navigating city streets alone at night, especially in the role of predator, the sickening rape and murder of Sarah Everard which shook the UK to its core in 2021 coming to mind. Also pertinent to contemporary discourse is the way The Woman learns to become both female and human; the reading of the film as a transgender narrative was touched upon at the time of its release, while the threats posed by artificial intelligence in the film industry and beyond can be seen in The Woman’s convincing performance, and eventual adoption, of human traits and values.
One final contemporary reading of Under the Skin is the idea that the film is a work of migrant literature, a racialised tale of otherness and xenophobia. The hostility with which The Woman is met, despite her best efforts at integration in the final act, is often read as synonymous with the immigrant experience. While this interpretation has its merits, I wonder if describing the woman as a “migrant,” with all its socio-political implications, is the best approach. Of course, her basic attributes and what little backstory we can glean from Glazer’s film suggest that she is indeed a stranger in a strange land, and what is the word “alien,” if not another word for “foreign?” Yet the power The Woman wields makes her quite unlike the majority of immigrants in Scotland, and it is only when she experiences hardship, when she is marginalised for her otherness, that we begin to recognise her as one.
Rather than resembling the migrants and refugees who come to the UK for a better life, for much of Under the Skin The Woman resembles the members of the upper echelons of society who get to decide their fates. In one of the film’s most chilling scenes, The Woman stumbles upon a tragic incident at a beach. She watches a woman swim out to rescue her dog from the increasingly violent waves, before getting into trouble in the water herself. A man, presumably her partner, leaves their infant child at the shore as he in turn dives in to rescue her. The Woman ignores this and begins chatting with a foreign tourist, a swimmer, who is forced to interrupt their conversation to go and save the man and woman from drowning. Only the swimmer survives, and even he, lying on the shore defeated by exhaustion, is then bashed in the head with a rock by The Woman, becoming her easiest kill to date.
Viewing the film through a contemporary lens, it’s easy to recognise, in this deadly combination of the awesome power of nature and the coldness of The Woman’s indifference, the plight of refugees from conflict zones in the Middle East and Africa as they traverse dangerous waters in the hope of finding safety in Europe. As she blithely watches the man and woman drown at sea, or ignores their crying baby who will surely suffer the same fate when the tide comes in, Johansson’s blank expression recalls the silence met by victims of the Greek boat disaster in June of this year. The Woman’s nonchalance in the face of such suffering is a positively moderate response compared to the pantomime villainy of the UK Government, its ministers wearing beaming smiles as they tour migrant facilities in Rwanda, or callously tweeting that refugees should “fuck off back to France.”
The intention of this scene at the superficial level is to demonstrate the difference between The Woman and us, to emphasise that her values and ideas are so completely alien that the tragic deaths of four people barely even register on her face. It sets up her redemption arc, identifying empathy as the key to her human transformation and the crucial difference between our species and hers. But, as the film’s brutal denouement shows us, empathy is not as common among the human race as we would like to think, and The Woman’s thoughtless cruelty in this scene seems less alien to us every day. The idea of a creature out there with no capacity for compassion is frightening enough, but isn’t it more terrifying to think that there are humans who have the capacity and choose not to use it?
Whatever cultural issues preoccupy us in 10 years’ time, I see no reason why Under the Skin shouldn’t have the same immediacy it possesses today. But if its blank canvas does become soiled by the passing of time, then at the very least it will serve as a testament to the power of truly visual storytelling. With this film Glazer set the standard for the literary adaptation, translating the themes and ideas of his source material in ways that so many other directors fail to do. For an art form that so often feels in thrall to its aesthetic and literary forebears, his film remains a seminal work of cinematic metamorphosis.
