Bugonia Fans Must Watch Scarlett Johansson’s Under The Skin

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Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, Bugonia, a darkly comedic and bizarre story starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, is now available. Critics are already praising it. The movie satirizes corporate culture and follows two men convinced of a conspiracy who kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO, believing she’s an alien trying to destroy the Earth. Bugonia tells this story through the detached eyes of an observer, which immediately brings to mind Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s quirky comedy and Jonathan Glazer’s unsettling horror film seem worlds apart. However, despite their different approaches, both movies explore a similar, thought-provoking question: What defines our humanity when viewed by something—or someone—not of this world? Glazer’s 2013 film, Under the Skin, adapted from Michel Faber’s novel, centers on an alien who preys on men in Scotland. But beyond this simple premise, the film offers a deeply moving and almost spiritual journey.

Glazer’s Under the Skin Is a Spiritual Experience

Watching Under the Skin is a very personal experience. The film doesn’t focus on a complicated story, but instead creates a unique and powerful feeling for each viewer. It’s a movie you need to see for yourself to truly understand – a simple summary just won’t do it justice.

The film opens with a strikingly artistic sequence, reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick, showing a strange being landing on Earth and trying to learn English. Soon after, we see a disturbing scene: a nude figure removes the clothes from an unconscious woman and puts them on herself. This marks the beginning of her sinister activities. Disguised as an attractive woman named Laura, or simply ‘The Female,’ and sporting bright lipstick, she drives a white van through the bleak, industrial landscapes of Scotland. Her goal is to trick lone men, often at night, into her van and take them to a deserted house where something unknown happens to them.

Her techniques are unsettlingly simple: she remains silent, asks questions, and exploits people’s natural inclination to help someone who appears beautiful and in need. As Glazer and Johansson describe her, she acts like a detached, calculating creature, almost like a programmed machine. What elevates this film beyond a typical story is how it was made. Glazer wasn’t just telling a tale about an alien; he aimed to create a genuinely immersive experience that revealed something about human nature.

Much of the film was shot secretly, using hidden cameras and real people who didn’t know they were being filmed. This makes watching the movie feel like observing everything from an outsider’s perspective – almost like an alien. You don’t just follow a character’s story; you experience the world through the eyes of an alien trying to understand the confusing, unpredictable nature of human life. Because the film focuses more on how we perceive things and what it feels like to be human, rather than on a traditional story, Under the Skin is a deeply immersive and thought-provoking experience that’s best felt directly, rather than simply explained.

Sound Design Played an Important Part in Under the Skin

Though Under the Skin features very little spoken dialogue, sound is central to the film’s storytelling. The sound design isn’t just background noise—it’s a key element that allows the audience to experience the world from the alien’s perspective. For sound designer Johnnie Burn (who also worked on Bugonia), and who later collaborated with director Jonathan Glazer again, Under the Skin was a turning point where he fully realized the impact sound could have in filmmaking.

Burn, used to the fast pace of making many television commercials, understood that Under the Skin needed a much more subtle and story-driven approach. He was dedicated to realism, so he went to Scotland himself to record the sounds you hear in the film. This resulted in a sound design that often features stark, almost complete silence. Under the Skin is unique because the fear doesn’t come from the monster itself, but from the detached, quiet way the film observes things.

Burn’s brilliance lay in making everyday sounds feel like an unsettling invasion for the alien character. He manipulated familiar noises – like traffic and conversations – by muffling, distorting, or abruptly cutting them off, transforming the normal world into something strange and disorienting. He often spoke about how this project fundamentally changed how he thought about sound design and storytelling.

The film Under the Skin uses sound to create a deeply personal experience for the viewer, particularly through Mica Levi’s score. The music isn’t meant to accompany the scenes; instead, it represents the alien’s internal programming. This emphasizes that her seduction and consumption of victims aren’t acts of enjoyment, but rather mechanical processes being carried out. This focus on sound makes the film’s unsettling story even more impactful and physically felt.

As Laura starts to understand and share the feelings of others, her carefully constructed world of sound begins to fall apart. Acts of kindness or upsetting events, like seeing someone drown, cause real-world sounds to break through her defenses. This isn’t just frightening – it feels like being flooded with human emotion, which is too much for her to handle and ultimately leads her down a destructive path.

Both Films Strip Humanity Down to Its Exploited Core

Both Under the Skin and similar science fiction explore the idea of humans being viewed as a resource by alien beings. These films suggest that fundamental aspects of existence – like desire, power, and life itself – are reduced to controlled systems meant to be used up. In Under the Skin, the alien’s purpose is solely about consumption; she lures victims into a trap that’s essentially a cold, scientific experiment where their bodies are broken down and discarded. She acts as a detached instrument within this alien system, simply extracting what’s needed.

The heartbreaking part of the film is the breakdown of the alien’s system. Her programming fails when she truly encounters people. There’s a sequence showing everyday human life, and it’s at this moment she first feels empathy. This new sense of mercy and understanding acts like a destructive force, throwing off her mission and leading to her demise. Under the Skin depicts a sophisticated, otherworldly being undone by emotion.

We see echoes of this idea in the film Bugonia, though it’s not directly stated. The debate over whether the protagonist is an alien remains open, even with the ending suggesting something otherworldly. However, Bugonia shows a similar pattern of exploitation: the corporation, Auxolith, not only caused Teddy’s mother’s death but then tried to silence his pain with a payoff.

Both Under the Skin and Bugonia explore alien failures, but for different reasons. In Under the Skin, the alien struggles with overwhelming emotion, while in Bugonia, the problem is a corporate system unable to understand human suffering and distrust. Bugonia builds on the idea of an alien observing humanity; by the end of the film, the alien character perfectly mimics a cold, corporate employee. She then reveals her true goal: her corporate work was actually a misguided effort to help humanity become more evolved and empathetic. The film suggests that the Andromedans, the aliens Teddy believes in, are using Michelle to determine whether humanity is worthy of survival, with the potential to wipe out the entire species if they fail.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Under the Skin offers a truly unsettling alien perspective, built through surprisingly raw, unscripted scenes, a fantastic soundscape, and a compelling performance by Scarlett Johansson. The film gradually draws you in, exploring how a machine develops the capacity for empathy. The final scene powerfully reveals the cost of achieving human consciousness, providing a subdued contrast to the film’s more frantic moments. If you see humanity reflected in this story, Under the Skin feels like the beginning of an alien assessment of our species.

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2025-11-14 04:40