Sounds of Under The Skin

Under The Skin explores the evolution of a machine’s mind and consciousness within a human society.

The introduction establishes the setting, accompanied by the film’s distinctive score, an hybrid between music and sound design. We observe what seems to be the creation of a robot. The sounds evoke a sense of beginning, an awakening. A voice and some words are formed and becoming more precise and clear, gradually, like a baby learning to use its voice. We understand that the machine’s hearing, sight, intelligence, and body are being constructed, and that, mainly thanks to the soundtrack.

From now on, we’ll follow this entity, played by Scarlett Johansson, as it discovers the world, humans, their behavior, its own body, and its emotions. This entity, which takes on human form under the guise of a woman, seems to be driven by a single purpose: she is programmed to find and trap men, then feed on them. She is, it seems, devoid of all emotions.

Initially, both the sound and the image suggest that the entity cannot truly listen or see or take interest at any other thing than her mission. To convey and make us feel this, the director choose the soundtrack more than the images. We are for a major part of the movie confronted with sounds of the environment that we are perceiving as weird and undistinguishable noises.

Gradually though, we sense that she begins to question herself. Something happened in her. The sounds of the environment are becoming more realistic and more precise, the music changes and becomes less stressful, the ambiances too. She’s starting to focus on other things than her initial purpose, and that’s impacting mainly the soundtrack of the movie, and not what we see on screen. This kind of invisible work is the perfect artistic choice to represent the internal movements of her mind and soul.

What does the sound convey in Under The Skin?

To me, the confusion and the reborn of the entity is portrayed by the sound, and then by the images, when in most movies it’s the other way around. That’s why it is such an interesting movie.

There is a deliberate use of sound to make us feel the character’s development, her evolution from a soulless machine to a being capable of feeling things, of being very human, perhaps more than some other humans.

Written on the spot, during my first watch