Under The Skin’s Supreme Ambiguity Yasser Owino College

There are a number of mind blowing short films that play in the same meticulously designed and weird art-house thriller space as Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. You mostly see that kind of thing on the Internet more than you do in the theater because supreme ambiguity as a cinematic category rarely attracts investment. The reason for this is contemptible but obvious; the lack of explanation or closure is painful. It hurts and as M. John Harrison says, “if there appears to be a failure of that process..... ” (Glazer, 2014). An unwillingness to serve up that failure to film goers, that pain and anxiety has ruled Hollywood from the beginning of filmmaking. This is the pain that most art house films possess. It is the very definition of the cinematic class in which Under the Skin is part of. Ideas like this find a home on the Internet which embraces almost everything. Art house films are potent because they are precise and brief. Twenty to thirty minutes of the very longest, happy to contain a single question, to be just a single question.

What makes Under the Skin so special is that it maintains this same potency across its 108 minute run time. The film follows Laura (Scarlett Johansson) a blank-faced but beautiful alien as she...