![]() At any rate, our alien is soon up and running in her Ford Transit, seducing wide-eyed males who can't believe their good luck and are quite right not to.Īt the seashore, she witnesses a complex "rescue" scene in which earthling emotions of pity and compassion are on display – feelings she does not share. Or perhaps that is another expired alien whose shape is being reused. The alien is transferred to Scotland's dark, rainy streets and it – she – appears to have a minder, who rides a motorbike, and secures for her a human bodyshape from a dead girl retrieved from the roadside. The story of Johansson's alien begins with a mysterious and Kubrickian "birth" scene in a brilliantly rendered dimensionless otherworld. This is how I imagine Elizabeth Taylor to have looked and behaved when Richard Burton first took her to Port Talbot. She greets the stunned menfolk with an unreadably polite half-smile. I wonder if they were called upon at any point.) Her alien is voluptuous, superbly insouciant, unaffected by her surroundings – though I think feeling the cold a tiny bit. (The final credits reveal that as well as a personal assistant, Johansson had a "personal security" team. A Hollywood A-lister is as much of an alien here as any extraterrestrial from a flying saucer. You can never forget it is Johansson on the screen, and that is surely the point. From these genuine crowds, professional actors will seamlessly emerge for dialogue scenes. There is pure situationist genius in the bizarre spectacle of sleek Johansson being placed in this context, with lots of hidden-camera shots of real passers-by in real Glasgow streets and real Glasgow shopping centres, all these people being coolly sized up and assessed for their calorific value. At one stage, she and her van are surrounded by guys with Celtic scarves. Between encounters, she roams, gazing at streetscapes, and making them alien with that gaze – like a Craig Raine poem. She winds down the passenger-side window, artlessly engages them in conversation, and takes them back to her place. ![]() Maybe you have to be a Scot, or anyway a Brit, to appreciate Glazer's masterstroke in casting Scarlett Johansson as the exotic alien in humanoid form, with her soft London accent, tousled black wig and sexy fake fur, driving a knackered white van around the tough streets of Glasgow, picking up men. The heroine is an alien predator at large in Scotland. It also comes with a dog-whistle of absurdist humour that I suspect has been inaudible for some American reviewers on the international festival circuit so far. The result is visually stunning and deeply disturbing: very freaky, very scary and very erotic. ![]() Jonathan Glazer's sci-fi horror is loosely adapted, or atmospherically distilled, by Walter Campbell from the 2000 novel by Michel Faber. ![]()
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