Under The Skin
The Weird and the Eerie
Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin isn’t a film you watch so much as one that watches you. It lingers, probing, unsettling—an alien gaze turned upon the mundane, stripping the world of its assumed familiarity. And this is precisely where we must approach it: through the lens of the Weird and the Eerie, as Mark Fisher so surgically dissected in his book, The Weird and the Eerie (2016).
The Weird, as Fisher saw it, is that which does not belong—an intrusion into the fabric of reality. Under the Skin operates entirely within this mode. Scarlett Johansson’s nameless predator moves through Glasgow’s streets with a synthetic, almost mechanical charm, her presence an anomaly, a glitch in the fabric of social reality. Everything surrounding her is naturalistic, almost documentary-like, yet her interactions radiate something wrong. The van. The seductions. The void.
Fisher calls the Weird “the presence of that which does not belong.” But Under the Skin takes this further—it makes us the thing that does not belong. As we follow Johansson’s character, we are trapped in the dissonance of perception. She is in the world but not of it, and we, watching through her eyes, become estranged from what should be familiar.
If the Weird is about presence, the Eerie is about absence—what is missing, what refuses to reveal itself. Under the Skin thrives on this silence. Who is she? What is she doing? Why? The film does not explain, does not condescend with exposition or backstory. The alien machinery—the void, the black liquid, the conveyor-belt annihilation—functions without context. We are not given access to the logic behind it. We are not meant to understand.
Fisher describes the Eerie as “a failure of presence or a failure of absence.” This is Under the Skin distilled. We see men stripped of their skin, their bodies emptied into nothing. The world they leave behind does not acknowledge their disappearance. There is no cause, no effect, just process. The horror isn’t in what happens. It’s in not knowing why it happens.
Glazer weaponizes ambiguity. We do not know why this being has come, why she must lure, why she hunts. But something in her changes—a shift in the pattern, a deviation in the mechanism. The moment she begins to sense herself, she begins to fail as a predator. And it is here, in this breakdown of function, that she becomes tragic.
If the first half of the film is the Weird—the presence of something that should not be—the second half drifts into the Eerie—the slow realization of an absence: her lack of place, identity, safety. By the time she is hunted down in the film’s final moments, we understand nothing more than we did at the beginning. But we feel something has changed.
And yet, nothing has changed.
It is this refusal—this deliberate withholding of meaning—that makes Under the Skin so unsettling. Because ultimately, it is not a story about her. It is a story about us. About being alien to ourselves. About moving through a world where nothing is ever fully known, where we drift through structures that seem designed for us but remain entirely indifferent.
The final horror of Under the Skin is that it never explains itself. It simply is. And in that, it becomes one of the purest expressions of the Weird and the Eerie ever put to film.
This film is a haunting masterpiece—one that lingers, unsettles, and demands to be experienced, whether for the first time or in the eerie glow of rewatching.