“Under the Skin poster” by Source (WP:NFCC#4). Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia –
You’d think a movie with multiple nude shots of Scarlett Johansson would be on the top of my list, but you’d be wrong. Despite fairly awesome nudity, Under the Skin has the pacing of a snail, going backwards down a hill in the snow if you recorded that snail on a video camera, played it back in slow motion and then froze the entire thing in a block of ice.
That doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t have it’s moments. Johansson plays an alien who lures men to their doom for reasons that are never explained. The reason you don’t get an explanation in this movie is that there is almost no dialogue and what little dialogue there is, is spoken by Scotts with accents thicker than molten steel. I understood almost no dialogue that wasn’t spoken by Scarlett’s character. Virtually nothing is explained and moments in the movie that are seemingly important, are shown in literally glimpses. But all that being said, the scenes where Scarlett lures and kills her prey are very creepy.
Those scenes start to pick up during the first third of the movie, but there’s so many panoramic shots of Scotland scenery that go nowhere and long stretches of WTF is happening, that as an audience member, I lost interest. By the time the movie resolves, I was more relieved than anything. It seemed like a whole lot of trouble for nothing. No real character development. A nice try, but no good. Swing and a miss. For an indie film, I feel bad, but Scarlett’s nudity was actually kind of boring.
And that I can’t forgive.
