5) Under the Skin
Under the Skin has the exact same plot as any first contact film from Le Voyage dans la Lune to Avatar: species travels to new celestial body, encounters native life forms, mayhem ensues. Stripped down to a beat sheet skeleton, it’s a giant cliché. And yet, Under the Skin is also the most singularly haunting film of 2014, an overwhelming plunge into the endless void of space and death that’s flecked with the distant white of starlight and life. A speck of pink living, driving, and stalking amidst the nothingness is the sublimely cast Scarlett Johansson as an alien mimic prowling Glasgow for prey. To say even that much is to say far more than the film ever does, and despite its hypnotic soundtrack, it’s the silence of Under the Skin that gives it an otherworldly power.
Like the obsidian Monolith from one of the sci-fi classics it often evokes, Under the Skin stands before you unyielding, unkind, but not uninviting. It gives so little because it has faith the viewer can make their way through the rich fog of its ambiguities. Playfully masking the only line of exposition as a pun (when trawling for men to abduct, the creature often asks for directions to the “M-8.”), Jonathan Glazer has directed one of the year’s simplest stories in the most audaciously opaque means imaginable.
Beyond just its entrancing compositions and experiments with form, Under the Skin is the most “movie” movie of 2014, a dark star in the constellation of cinema as visual medium, and, as Roger Ebert would say, “machine that generates empathy.” Whether that empathy can, or should be shared with a thing that doesn’t have any of its own is just another of Under the Skin’s many entangling mysteries.