So anyway, we have here our film about a woman-shaped nonhuman, leading men to be devoured by a mysterious force in an abandoned house. Horror/sci-fi, close enough, but something about Under the Skin makes any attempt to put it in a genre film box feel like a perverse attempt to deprive it of its energy. It is a nightmare, but it is also beautiful and transporting.
I'd like to say that it was the desire to fuse those two elements of the film that led me to pick the shot I did, but it's more like an after-the-fact justification. The fact is, even before Nathaniel announced this title, I knew what single image from the film had hit me the hardest, the kind of image that only happens a handful of times in a given year, if you're lucky. It comes after the single most horrifying instant in the picture, when one of the Johansson-thing's victims watches another one being suddenly sucked dry of everything from blood to bone. This leaves behind only a shroud of flesh, floating in the deep black pool of nothing where the force dwells.
Under the Skin is too dense with ideas of what "the body" means, how gender is processed visually and socially, the nature of violent acts and selfishness, and the like, to make any absolute statements on the order of, "this is what the film Is About". But one of the things it is about is the complexity of how beauty, death, and terror interact with each other, and this is not anywhere more immediate and intense to me than in this single instant. I would dearly love to pretend that I have some rich, complicated thematic argument that I could indulge in - I just wrote how many words about a single frame from a Batman picture? - but I think that's part of the genius of this film, is that it does so much on an intuitive level. I picked this shot because it's the one that left me flat on my ass before I had any chance to react, and that's all there is to it. And movies that can hit that hard are the rarest and most pleasurable of all.
Your boss would have to squint pretty hard to see anything NWS about this one.
ReplyDeleteStill, a good choice. I would go with the extreme wide of her at the bus stop, myself — that one's a real wonder of mood, composition, pace, and tension over the character's emotional state of mind.
Yikes! How do you pick a single shot from this movie? You picked a good one, from the most viscerally shocking and disturbing moment in the film.
ReplyDeleteIf I had to pick a runner-up, it'd be the shot where she catches her reflection in the grimy mirror in the killhouse, apparently for the first time. The lighting on her face, the way she moves in and out of shadow.
So many things going on in that shot. On the narrative level, this moment spins the plot in an entirely new direction, but also expresses the theme of identity, and it also puts the audience inside her POV. Who hasn't had the experience of looking long into a mirror until your own face is that of a stranger?
Rick, that reminds me of Claudia Cardinale staring into a mirror in Once upon a Time in the West for what must be at least a full minute. Produces exactly that effect (with a little help from Morricone).
ReplyDeleteIt is so freaking difficult to choose ONE shot from Under the Skin as the "best", or even as the most representative, but I just love how long this shot is held, long enough to take something grotesque and turn it into something beautiful (which could indeed be what the film Is About).
ReplyDeleteGood choice, and I remember being jolted and mesmerised and almost repulsed by this image all at the same time.
ReplyDeleteI think I'd have plumbed for either Johannsen's foot lifting from the black reflective floor, or the culmination of that sequence of people on the streets of Glasgow which eventually becomes a shimmering tapestry of overlays, though I'm not sure if you could actually isolate in one single screengrab the precise moment at which that scene achieves its sense of absolute dreamlike wonder.