Under the Skin -- Take 2: Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin was better received by critics than by audiences upon its 2013 release. Perhaps audiences were surprised when a promisingly sexy thriller turned into sci fi, without having the en route mysteries explained.

I any case, Under the Skin gains considerable interest from Glazer’s next film, the extremely successful 2023 Zone of Interest. The illumination is mutual. 

Both films open with an eerie, barely musical sound track and ambiguous abstract imagery. The effect is disturbing and suggestive of an other-worldly context, an abnormality.

Both films follow an outsider’s experience of an alien world. Here it’s the heroine’s exploration of Earth. She seduces men to harvest their internals. Somehow the severely disfigured victim escapes. When she encounters a non-predatory man she deepens her vulnerability. Drawn into sexual intimacy she is shocked to discover herself unable to admit her lover. She is ultimately destroyed by a frustrated rapist.

    In the later film it’s the Nazi commandant and his family who are coldly detached from normal human feelings and responsibility, as they try to marginalize their concentration camp.

     Indeed both films center on exposing the central woman as an inhuman. One is an alien whether from outer space. She proves a first draft of that completely selfish and heartless Zone of the Nazi functionary’s Interest.