Jonathan Glazer (UK, born 1965)

Under the Skin (2013)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Under The Skin is in two distinct parts. Unlike Tabu or Melancholia, there are no title cards to tell you this, no announcement. But something happens, almost exactly half-way through, that dramatically changes our principal character, and I don’t know what that something is.

I was aware beforehand that Scarlett Johansson was playing an alien. The film doesn’t tell us this, as such, until the very end, and if I hadn’t known, I don’t think I’d have worked it out for myself as she spends the first half of the film driving a van around Glasgow and making amiable, if occasionally awkward, chitchat with the natives- all male. She’s a little odd, a little distant, and seems relatively unaware of how attractive she is, but nothing that screams ‘alien’ to someone, like myself, who doesn’t tend to be very good at that kind of lateral thinking. The scenes are punctuated by images of Johansson and the suitors, naked, against a sheer black backdrop and entering pools of water. This was apparently supposed to be Johansson’s ‘alien’ killing and consuming the men, though again, it’s so open-ended that if I hadn’t known I’d have probably assumed that these were simply visual representations of seductions and the sex act.   

None of this material was bad. It was unusual, perhaps a little confusing, but it was generally fine. I might even go so far as to say I quite enjoyed it. Then the movie’s second half sent me sideways. Suddenly, Johansson’s character becomes mute, almost catatonic, for almost an entire hour of film-time. The impetus for this seems to be the encounter she has had with the deformed man- I’m not being cruel, that’s literally how he’s described in the credits- in which she evidently does not kill or consume him, but lets him live. Suddenly our principal character is not our character anymore.

I queried what the ‘point’ of Margaret was, so it would be unfair to that film if I didn’t mention that I often asked the same question when I was watching this one, or assert that it spends significant periods flirting quite heavily with tedium. Margaret, though, was a character study, something which, one could argue, is a ‘point’, a purpose, in and of itself.

So, is Under the Skin a character study? Well, Scarlett Johansson is in practically every frame, so you would have to at least theorise that it is. What else is it? Well, it’s not a comedy, I can tell you that much. Is it a drama? Yeah, a bit. Is it a suspense film? Again, yeah, a bit. Is it sci-fi? Well, technically, but it would be unlikely to satiate any purist fans of that genre. Is it, as has been put forward by other critics, an essay concerning gender politics? Well, possibly, but not in any way my feeble brain could elucidate on.

I don’t know. Against my better judgement, I looked at other reviews and the kinds of things other critics had to say about it, before writing my own.  I saw the film compared to works by Michelangelo Antonioni and Stanley Kubrick, amongst others. You could add Andrei Tarkovsky to that mix, if you wanted to- Stalker, for example, which features characters who, just like Johansson, have entered an uncomfortable landscape that they don’t belong in and can actively hurt them. But just because I can draw a superficial parallel, it doesn’t mean I’m sure the film is redolent of Tarkovsky, or any of these other directors, on any deeper, more meaningful level.

I’m not really sure of anything, really, except to say that Under the Skin is a perplexing piece. And unfortunately, I don’t recommend it. There are too many things about it that don’t make sense, and I’m not just talking literal, linear sense, but logical sense, too (spoiler ahead). At the end of the film, Johansson is attacked in the woods by a man who wants to rape her. She runs away, terrified, desperate to escape. Why? She’s apparently killed several men over the course of the movie, why can’t she kill this one? If I wanted to look for possible metaphors, then maybe she represents someone who has looked back at their last few years and decided they don’t want to be that person anymore, who resolves not to do any of the things they used to do, and starts to behave completely differently, over-correcting their past indiscretions by acting in a way that is unnecessarily silent and withdrawn. Johansson’s reaction to her potential rapist would then represent an unwillingness to hurt him, to break her vow, and not, in fact, an inability. If this is the case, then this would encapsulate emotions that were distinctly human, and don’t really hold up against the character’s ‘alien’ status.

Like I say, I don’t know. I could point out that this is probably one of the bravest roles I’ve ever seen a Hollywood megastar take, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Johansson’s performance. But the film left me cold, and bored; I think I was supposed to find it disturbing, especially in its abrasive final act, and I didn’t.

Birth (2004)

Birth stars Nicole Kidman as Anna, a widow who lost her husband suddenly and unexpectedly at a very young age, and is now engaged to be married to Joseph (Danny Huston). We pick the story up when this second relationship is already in full swing- we don’t know if Anna and Joseph are particularly compatible, and we are never shown anything from her first marriage.

This sets the scene for the movie’s central quandary and reason to exist. A ten-year-old boy enters their lives and confidently claims that he is the reincarnation of Anna’s dead husband Sean. As viewers, we have never met Sean- he’s featured in the opening scene, but always from behind, and we don’t know what he was like and we don’t know how he and Anna used to behave together.

The movie continues as something of a balancing act. How seriously should we take this boy, and to what extent should we cast firm judgement on Anna’s actions? Kidman is playing a balancing act too, because if you can dismiss her character as some sort of gullible idiot, this essentially renders redundant the entire movie’s emotional and dramatic worth; similarly, the child actor Cameron Bright has to be both believable and somewhat suspect for the movie as a whole to function.

I really liked Birth; I thought it was an exceptional piece of provocative drama that felt mature and authentic, not a Caché-esque ‘prank’ or overly ironic attempt to rile the viewer. It seemed to want to examine some thorny and difficult questions about humanity- among them, what is love, why do we fall in love, and why does love make us behave in ways that do not behoove us in the slightest?

How much control do we really have over ourselves?

Why do the ghosts of our past continue to hold such power?

Can our house of cards really collapse with so small a push?

How understanding (or otherwise) would you be if this was happening to one of your family or friends?

And of course the perennial What would you do in this situation, and why?

There’s more than a hint of von Trier here, not just in how that director introduces extraordinary elements into otherwise very veristic settings, but also in the way a female character is foregrounded and how we can, in close-up, observe her making decisions that ride the line between baffling, outright bad, and understandable. Kidman, just as in Dogville, is excellent, playing a woman who appears more sober, and with more wherewithal, than Bess in Breaking the Waves, Justine in Melancholia, or Selma in Dancer in the Dark, an observation which in itself reflects a piece that affects more composure than von Trier’s comparatively chaotic, wild world.

More questions: What is Joseph thinking? Why is he so keen to marry a woman who doesn’t appear to be that interested in him and seems to have accepted his proposal reluctantly? Has love blinded him, or is he more focused on the ego-based benefits gained from the acquisition of a beautiful wife? Along with his co-stars, Danny Huston is also required to elicit complex effects from his role as he portrays a man who seems fairly reasonable for the most part, if perhaps a little arrogant, as most moneyed men probably are, but also exhibits some possessive qualities and has a temper that he is quite willing to indulge every now and then. If these last aspects are distinctly unappealing, then one has to remind themselves that his fiancée is quite literally being stolen from him by a child- a child who is, by all measures of logic and good sense, lying and playing games in some sort of pernicious attempt to ruin his life. Is he really supposed to remain calm and placid throughout the entire picture?

Birth may be characterised as many things, but prevalent among them, I felt, was that it was an examination of loss, something that we can all relate to in one form or another. Not even the luckiest among us can get through life without losing anything. Well-written, well-acted, well-directed, resolutely mysterious and coming in at a trim, economical 96 minutes with barely a word wasted, I have nothing but praise for it.

The Zone of Interest (2023)

In his review for this movie, Robert Daniels of rogerebert.com begins by stating that ‘Though it’s been seven months, I remain haunted by The Zone of Interest. When I first watched writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s radical take on the Holocaust back in May, I couldn’t pinpoint quite what was so startling about it.’

His thoughts echo mine. Aware of its central conceit, and wondering how ‘far’ the movie was going to take its rigid, one-note, single-concept foundational dynamic, I started watching it and observed Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and members of their family potter around their house, chatter about the sort of trivial minutiae that families talk about at home, of no interest or relevance to anyone outside their immediate social circle, and sometimes play in the swimming pool in the garden. These garden scenes carried the most weight in the film’s early stages, I felt, because you could see the fence.

The fence.

Along with a glimpse of the building behind it.

A striking image, in context, but not one that Glazer appeared to be ‘developing’ in any way, beyond its implication, and I wondered warily to myself if this was what the entire film was going to be like.

And it was. Give or take the odd artistic flourish, such as a brief animated sequence, and a plot point regarding a promotion for Rudolf that later sees us leave the house for a few scenes and ultimately provides the narrative coda for the movie’s closing stages, this is, more or less, what the entire film is like.

Stilted, to put it bluntly. Too focused and conceptual for its own good.

But then it crept under my skin.

One scene, for example, shows Hedwig trying on a coat in her bedroom. The sounds of gunshots come floating in through her open window, and she doesn’t react to them. I didn’t react to them either, at the time. She’s living next to Auschwitz- it stands to reason that she’s going to hear gunshots. By extension, I am watching a film about people who live next to Auschwitz- it stands to reason that I am going to hear gunshots too. I mean, it’s the very least I can expect really, so why would I be surprised?

I didn’t appreciate until later how incisive this technique is as a device to tell this particular story. It was only really after the movie had finished and I started to process what I’d seen- and crucially, hadn’t seen- that the film’s real value started to reveal itself. After Claude Lanzmann’s no-stone-unturned ten-hour documentary Shoah, along with movies such as Schindler’s List, The Pianist and Son of Saul, all providing a different take on the Holocaust and all presented with a different approach and style, The Zone of Interest is a stellar example of how these atrocities can still be viewed from a new angle and yield results that are startling in their effectiveness, ingratiating themselves into your psyche through slow-burning but firm-handed insinuation.  

So I found The Pianist to be a very smooth, solid and assured piece of relatively enjoyable cinema, albeit one that was, naturally, extremely grave and solemn. I was more ambivalent about the overtly experimental, less digestible Son of Saul, despite the fact that I was pretty sure I could see the film’s aims and felt that it succeeded in achieving them. In The Zone of Interest we have something that exists somewhere between those two pieces, and in terms of form and structure doesn’t resemble either of them. Son of Saul, however, could be the exact ‘second film’ that plays out concurrently alongside The Zone of Interest, expressed here completely through ambient sound, despite the fact that the former’s diegetic timeframe is a couple of days and the latter’s is about a year. If The Zone of Interest is indeed the yin to Son of Saul’s yang, and perhaps provides direct compliment to Nemes’s artistically superb but narratively slight and dissatisfying exercise in immersion, then it is perhaps because it shows us ‘the other side’ of that film- the other side of the fence, in a concrete, literal sense, but also the other side of how a filmmaker handles this genocide, as it is calm where Son of Saul was frenetic, it is intelligible where Son of Saul was oblique, it is bright where Son of Saul was murky, and it shows us nothing of the death camp whereas Son of Saul- within reason- showed us everything.

On one level, I feel as if making a film about the Holocaust is somewhat futile. No matter how good your movie is, you simply won’t be able to properly capture the dread. The Zone of Interest essentially sidesteps this ‘concern’ by simply not showing any of the Holocaust, and ostensibly not even attempting to capture ‘the dread’, taking a different route entirely. The victims are faceless, nameless, without form, and exist on some other plane of concern, not this one. Soon they won’t exist at all. The Zone of Interest perversely pushes ephemera forward instead and in a blank, empty but implicitly threatening tone, tells us to focus on that. What matters here is Rudolf’s promotion and how it will potentially interfere with Hedwig’s homelife as well as the upbringing of the children. Will she be able to stay in the house that she has grown to love? Will her mother ever visit the house again, and how will their general relationship be affected by her sudden departure? And will Rudolf prove himself resourceful enough to handle the arrival and ‘processing’ of 700,000 new inmates?

The retching scene at the end comes out of nowhere, and seems to me to be a fully transparent, direct homage to Joshua Oppenheimer’s nonfiction The Act of Killing. There, as in this piece, the emphasis was firmly and squarely on the banality of evil, and how people who commit unspeakable acts- or are blithely and contentedly complicit in them- might look and act just like some crusty old teacher you used to have at school, or one of your neighbours, or some guy that your dad used to know, or the woman working behind the counter at the local newsagent. You can’t really stare evil in the face- you’ll never be able to comprehend it, and that’s why I feel movies like Schindler’s List, The Pianist and Son of Saul, as much as I respect them, have something slightly deficient at their centre (I haven’t seen Shoah yet). Yet when The Zone of Interest doesn’t stare evil in the face at all, and barely looks at it, highly stimulating, intellectually rigorous effects ensue. You can almost feel the six million murdered men, women and children lying in the movie’s fetid underbelly.

The performances of the two lead actors? The film relies extremely heavily on their effectiveness, and because I felt that the film was a triumph, I have to surmise that their performances were a triumph too. Nevertheless, in both instances, it’s difficult to fully assess how good the lead actors were or exactly what it was that they were doing well. Both Friedel and Hüller seem to be fully aware of the grave enormity of their roles- understandably so, of course- and both seem to be controlling themselves extremely rigidly lest any part of their portrayals be considered a misstep. They are exhibiting the ‘human’ sides of inhuman people, which requires intense focus and dexterity- subsequently, they both deliver withholding performances that emphasise cold pragmatism and dry detachment. We don’t really know how they feel and they genuinely may not be feeling much of anything. They are not shown to be cruel to their children, and when their civil, mature exchanges sometimes grow tense, they don’t raise their voices to each other, let alone get into shouting matches; this calmness would, in other movies, in other contexts, be presented as an attribute. Neither, though, are they ever shown to smile, or laugh, or make jokes, or be silly with the kids, or do any of the things that the relatively normal people in one’s relatively normal life do. Such things would be inappropriate in a film like this, of course, but the two also don’t seem to have any romantic feelings for each other, an element that adds yet another brittle note to this acrid bouquet of a movie.

I was pretty disturbed by the picture, and since that was its undeniable endgame, I must declare it a resounding success. It’s the kind of Holocaust film Michael Haneke might make- arctic, frigid, pitiless, passive-aggressive, obdurate. No redemption, no catharsis, no Schindler-esque character arc. No crumb of comfort. No lessons learned. No prevailing over the odds. And it positions Jonathan Glazer, despite his slim filmography (and my currently-unchanged, continuing antipathy toward Under the Skin), as potentially one of the sharpest and most accomplished directorial talents of his generation.