“Under the Skin” came up while Peter and I were surfing Prime for a movie. At 99 minutes, it fit into the remaining evening before bedtime, a consideration for me these days…
It turned out to be 109 minutes, but was so incredibly engaging that the I hardly noticed.
It was listed as Sci-Fi, starring Scarlett Johansson. I had enjoyed her in other movies (in other genres) up to that point, including “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” which we watched just last week.
Spoiler Alert! Don’t continue reading if you want to watch the movie with fresh eyes, which I would highly recommend, as it’s quite a powerful journey.
Johansson’s character, an android created for the purpose of luring single, lonely men to unexplained locations where the men meet their demise in a very sci-fi, visually interesting way.
Johansson’s droid does this over the course of several nights in a city (which, I imagine, is when it’s easier to pick up lonely men by themselves). She is careful to only pick up men who are obviously alone, confirming their lonely status before taking them to the Killing Room. One day, she enters a tea room, where the server places a slice of cake before her on her table. She takes a bite, but chokes because she obviously cannot swallow…
When she picks up a pedestrian who has a facial deformity, her conversation is not unlike the conversations she has with her victims. However, she learns that he has never had a girlfriend and observes that he has very soft-looking hands. She stops the car, and asks to touch his hand. He allows this. She asks if he would like to touch her face. After a pause, he says yes (a beautiful woman offering a man with a misshapen head to touch her), and he strokes her face very gently. She takes him to the now-familiar set, a black room with a black floor, and, as before, she undresses and he follows, undressing, just as every other man she’s lured. However, the next scene shows this same man, hurrying through tall grass back into the city to his house, where another man (her handler) meets him, kills him, and takes away his body.
The following scene shows her riding on a city bus, and it’s clearly been raining and it’s cold, the driver talking to her and advising her to put on a coat or find another way to avoid freezing.
At a bus stop outside the city, she meets a man at a bus stop, and he, like everyone else, tells her that she must find something to stay warm or to go somewhere warm. She goes with him on the bus to the grocery store, where he buys his groceries and she looks at items on the shelves but picks up nothing.
They return to his home, where he prepares dinner, though she pointedly doesn’t try to eat, and he puts her into a small bedroom with a cup of tea before closing the door behind him.
It’s not clear how much time has passed, but in a scene where he kisses her and she returns the desire, they lie in bed, kissing. He tries to penetrate her, but cannot because, as she discovers, she has no vagina!
So the android runs away. Her handler and two other motorcycle-riding characters search. The android is walking through a wood in a light rain, and a man comes across her path, telling her to stay on the path because it can be easy to get lost in the large wood. She comes upon a bothy, where she lies on the raised sleeping platform and, it seems, falls asleep. She is suddenly awakened by the man she saw in the wood, and she escapes, running through the wood. As she runs past him, however, he catches her arm, peeling a piece of her skin away. When she stops running, she takes pieces of her skin and peels it off, on her hands, arms, and then she removes the skin on her head and face. She sits, staring at the face, as the man finds her, douses her in gasoline, and lights it to burn her.
One interpretation of the actions of the man she encounters in the wood could be this: A man has the right to anything, and, if he cannot possess it sexually, he is free to destroy it (as this one does).
Last night, we watched a (mostly) lighter movie titled “The Sheep Detectives.” The cast is, simply put, impressive.
The story opens with a shepherd (played by Hugh Jackman) writing a letter describing his life. He describes his sheep, each of whom he’s named “because every sheep deserves a name.” The camera pans to each sheep as he describes them:
The first is a black ram who stands at the top of the escarpment looking over the other sheep in the field below. He’s a Loner, and doesn’t occupy the field with the rest of the sheep. One sheep is named Lily, who, he describes, is the smartest one. He goes on the describe other sheep in the herd, including twins who like to joust by ramming each other playfully and will ram anything unless they’re told explicitly not to. The shepherd describes his day-to-day life with the sheep, including feeding them hay, giving them medicine, and sheering their wool.
In an early scene, three (Spring) lambs frolic and come upon a much smaller lamb with mottled fur. They playfully ask it its name, and it replies that it has no name. An older sheep tells the frolicking lambs not to play with the runt, who is, they explain disdainfully, “a Winter lamb.”
Lo, and behold, the shepherd turns up dead in the field, dressed but not wearing his hat or coat. The sheep immediately start speculating, taking guesses at who the culprit could be based on the mystery novels the shepherd would read to them before bedtime every evening.
Hilarity ensues as the sheep try to solve his murder. The animation is good enough to not be a distraction, and the story is good. Of the human characters (several sheep are voiced by famous actors), Emma Thompson plays the shepherd’s attorney, which made perfect sense to me.
“Sheep Detectives” is a (mostly) light (one tear-jerker), entertaining movie that uses animation to create a seamless, otherwise live-action, movie.
Both are definitely worth watching.
nkpyallinone 