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The sci-fi/horror film Under the Skin (2013) is director Jonathan Glaser’s stripped back telling of the novel of the same title by Faber (2000). Its narrative is based on the emotionless Alien (Scarlett Johansson), whose primary function is to seduce lone men and lure them to a terrifying end. The Alien’s journey is one that develops, as she becomes increasingly cognisant of a physical and mental experience beyond the primary function of her task. This sets in motion a sequence of events that leads to her eventual and brutal murder.
I will discuss how the Alien functions as a mechanism for projective identification and acts as both the conduit of primitive terror, and how later in the film, the Alien becomes the site of infantile anxieties, of helplessness and disintegration. The audience is confronted by the first horrors of the Alien’s task, to seduce and lure solitary men to their death. To literally suck out all the interior space.
In my reading of the film, I consider some of the internal psychic mechanisms, which bring this primitive horror to life, broadly using a psychoanalytic framework to do so. I do not give a blow by blow account of the film, but prefer to concentrate on some key themes and moments of narrative shift, which, in my view, offer some insight that could be interesting for child psychotherapists to think about.
There are some potential paralells between the depiction of the male victims in the film and our child and adolescent patients, and how their experience of gender and sexuality can be thwarted and maladapted. Our child and adolescent patients can feel both seduced by and at the same time horrified when entering the consulting room, and all that the clinical setting may entail for them.There is also something significant in the film that we can think about, regarding how female clinicians’ bodies are ‘used’ and projected into by our child and adolescent patients, and how we as a profession can sometimes avoid thinking about our own sexuali