Why Scarlett Johansson's 'Under the Skin' Deserves Your Attention on Netflix

Among the many films Scarlett Johansson has taken on across a career spanning virtually every genre imaginable, Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin stands apart as perhaps her most genuinely radical piece of work. The 108-minute sci-fi thriller, according to Collider, is set to leave Netflix at the end of October, making now the ideal moment to revisit — or discover — one of the more singular achievements in recent genre filmmaking.

A Film That Resists Easy Classification

Released in 2014, Under the Skin operates at a frequency that most mainstream science fiction never attempts to reach. Where alien invasion narratives typically concern themselves with spectacle and conquest, Glazer's film is almost meditative in its approach — an exercise in sustained, disquieting observation. Johansson plays a nameless figure referred to only as the Female, an extraterrestrial entity who adopts the appearance of a woman to move undetected through the landscapes of Scotland. Her method is deceptively simple: she drives a van, approaches men, engages in casual conversation, and uses their unguarded responses to determine their vulnerability. Those with families or meaningful social ties are released; those who exist on the margins are not so fortunate. The first such encounter ends in a darkened warehouse where her victim is submerged in a viscous, tar-like void — an image that lodges itself in the mind long after the credits roll.

What makes this inversion so effective is how deliberately Glazer upends the conventions of predator-and-prey storytelling. The Female is unambiguously the aggressor, yet the film never frames her with the kind of moral certainty that would make her easy to categorize. She is alien, yes — but she is also curious, and that curiosity becomes the engine of the narrative.

Craft as Storytelling

Glazer's directorial instincts here echo the kind of immersive naturalism associated with filmmakers like Werner Herzog or the early work of Terrence Malick — artists for whom atmosphere carries as much narrative weight as dialogue. A significant portion of Under the Skin was filmed using hidden cameras, capturing genuine, unrehearsed interactions between Johansson and members of the Scottish public who were largely unaware they were part of a film. The result is a texture of authenticity that no amount of conventional production design could manufacture. Most of the non-Johansson participants had little to no acting experience, which only deepens the sense that the viewer is watching something closer to documentary than drama.

Micachu's unsettling, strings-driven score functions almost as a second language throughout the film, giving sonic shape to the Female's alien interiority. It is the kind of soundtrack that changes how you hear silence afterward — a quality shared by only a handful of truly great genre films.

Johansson at Her Most Unguarded

For audiences who associate Johansson primarily with her work as Natasha Romanoff in the Marvel universe, or who are anticipating her upcoming projects — she is currently attached to Mike Flanagan's 'The Exorcist: Martyrs' and has drawn attention for her role in 'Paper Tiger' at NYFF — Under the Skin offers something categorically different. It is a performance built almost entirely on physical presence and silence, demanding that the actor convey an evolving, alien interiority through the subtlest of registers.

For those interested in how Johansson has navigated the boundary between commercial and art-house cinema, it's also worth noting the planned theatrical re-release of 'The Prestige', another film in which she operates within a rigorously constructed genre framework. But Under the Skin remains in a category largely its own.

Don't Miss Your Window

Distributed in the United States under the A24 banner, Under the Skin has aged into the kind of modern classic that rewards patient, attentive viewing. It is not a film that delivers conventional thrills or narrative resolution — Glazer deliberately leaves the ending open to interpretation — but it is one that takes the possibilities of science fiction seriously as a vehicle for examining what it means to be human, often through the cold, clarifying lens of something that is decidedly not. With its Netflix availability expiring on October 31st, the window to stream it is brief. That deadline, frankly, suits the film's own quietly urgent sensibility.