For most of Under the Skin, she’s the one doing the looking. Then, alone in a borrowed room, she turns that flat, patient stare on herself, and the whole film holds its breath.
What happens in Under the Skin
Jonathan Glazer’s film casts Johansson as an extraterrestrial wearing a woman’s form, driving a van around Glasgow and collecting lone men who never make it home. By the final stretch she has abandoned the van in the Highland fog and accepted a room from a stranger who offered to help her on a bus.
That’s where the mirror scene lives. Fully nude and entirely alone, she stands before the glass and examines the body she has been walking around in, like someone reading an instruction manual for the first time. Variety singled out “one extended full frontal scene watching herself in a mirror.” It may be the least erotic famous nude scene of the century, and that’s deliberate: writing in The Atlantic, Noah Gittell said it “doesn’t play as even remotely sexual.” What it plays as is curiosity, which might be the most human thing she does all film.
Johansson told ABC News the shoot made her notice “how self-conscious you can be about the way you look, your own vanity,” and told the BBC, “I totally trusted Jonathan,” because “I am so vulnerable in this.” She was 27 or 28, working through a Scottish winter.
It sits on top of our Scarlett Johansson rankings, and it’s the search that has climbed fastest this month. For the darker side of the same character, follow her into the black void.
Film: Under the Skin (2013) · Venice world premiere, September 3, 2013; UK (StudioCanal) March 14, 2014; U.S. (A24) April 4, 2014 · directed by Jonathan Glazer · Scarlett Johansson as the Female
All Scarlett Johansson scenes
1Now watchingMirror Scene Under the Skin (2013)- 2Void Walk Under the Skin (2013)
- 3Opening Under the Skin (2013)
- 4The Slip A Good Woman (2004)
- 5Rain Scene (no nudity) Match Point (2005)
- 6Darkroom Kiss (no nudity) Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
Back to the hub: Scarlett Johansson nude: every scene, ranked.