Depending on who you asked, Under the Skin was either the best movie play at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, or the worst. “An original piece of cinema that is gorgeous, mesmerizing, heartbreaking, frustrating and pretentious all at the same time,”; declared Gregory Ellwood of HitFix. “It has some of the most haunting images of the year and features the bravest performance of Scarlett Johansson’s career.”; Meanwhile, Kaleem Aftab of the Independent awarded the movie one star, calling it “laughably bad.”;
The one thing that just about everyone could agree on though: It was certainly the weirdest movie to play at TIFF.
Based on the new trailer, it’s easy to see why so many people reached that conclusion – this looks like a really, really weird.
Loosely based on Michael Faber’s novel of the same name, the movie stars Scarlett Johansson stars as an alien who preys on Scottish hitchhikers in order to supply food for a corporation back on her home planet. But none of that comes across in the trailer, which mostly consists of weird images accompanied by an ambient electronic score.
Needless to say, this is probably going to divide audiences just as sharply as it divided critics.
