Under The Skin

There is a spot in the swimming pool, somewhere around a third of the way in along the floor's decline and water's rise, where the level of water above the floor turns from shallow into deep,. It is not exactly a hair's breadth in the space it takes up but is little more (or less) than a foot. It is in this more or less foot of space where the water flows at a level equipoised between shallow and deep where I would place Jonathon Glazer's Under The Skin. It is a film that resides neither upon the surface nor deep beneath it but inbetween.
  It has been compared to Kubrick by some critics but it seems to bare more in common with the films of Andy Warhol, which I mean to its credit. The film focuses on how things look, it does not go into depth about what they are. You are left to figure that out for yourself, as though you are looking at a photograph; which you are, a moving one, light indented onto film. That people have commented on how well Scarlett Johanson does a Scottish accent is indicative of how much of a carte blanche the audience is given, they can make of it what they will if they want to (she does no such thing (you can understand everything what she is saying for one thing) and I'd suggest the people who comment that she does so are overshooting for verisimilitude).
  The main surface which which Under The Skin focuses on is the surface of man, his skin, the edge of his body, in its multitude of forms. It has an interest in reflective surfaces also, particularly mirrors. This may be highly superficial, I'm not sure. However, if we are to accept that in some sort of transgenic metaphysical manner God created man in his image then there is also something divine, and, if not essential, quintessential, in studying the surface of man, the edge of his body, his skin, in its multitude of forms. Invariably when you are looking at the surface you are looking at what lies beneath it, there lurking, not even lurking, simply, beneath.
  To be subjective, it's a beautiful film to look at. Like all beauty, it lies somewhere inbetween; in the eye of the beholder (the lens of a camera); a bridge to take us somewhere we would find it difficult to get to without it.