Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

An arthouse horror drawn from the premise of 1985's panned Lifeforce, in that an alien female vampire preys on the male populace of Earth, Under the Skin earns a fair amount of kudos for opting to create disquiet rather than going for the jugular. The scenes where Scarlett Johansson drains her single male victims are nightmarish psychic events rather than being saturated with blood and the film is punctuated with longueurs where she's just driving around non-descript Scottish towns which force consideration of all the things we are asked to contemplate.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, on the level of a study in absolute alienation from contemporary society, is a relevant reference point. There are also strong echoes of Tarkovsky and Lars Von Trier in the sense of the character's haunted isolation. The lack of blood is a parallel with, though not a cause of, its bloodless air, just as the nudity is purely surgical: the predator is an autist who is defeated not by the traditional human bacteria as an insurmountable barrier to alien invasion, but her own sheer incomprehension at the complexity of the world. Credit must be given for the film's ambition, but it does succumb to mistaking that ambition for profundity.

6/10