Under the Skin is a low-key sci-fi by Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, The Zone of Interest). It follows an alien (Scarlett Johansson) moving through Glasgow in her van, where she seduces men not into companionship, but into a black, nebulous void, an encounter with something never fully explained or revealed.
These men are taken and processed as part of a larger, unseen system, an operation that, in the original novel by Michel Faber, connects back to her home planet, where human bodies are harvested and consumed as a resource. Glazer’s adaptation keeps this logic just out of reach, reframing it as something abstract, unknowable, and slightly eerie: a world of quiet extraction, operating without visible cause or consequence.
While never fully explained, a figure moves in the background. He is associated with the alien, appearing after she kills a man on a beach to erase traces of her existence. Known as the Motorcycle Man, he is an eerie presence - observing, tracking, closing distance.
After an unexpected fall in the street, she is helped by strangers and begins to experience something unfamiliar: empathy. Something has shifted. When later examined by the Motorcycle Man, she is assessed and ultimately allowed to continue, her presence still intact within the system, but no longer entirely defined by it.
She is no longer only operating within the logic she arrived with; she is beginning to feel her way into something closer to humanity. This shift opens a threshold where identities blur—what is beneath the alien’s skin, and what has been there all along beneath ours.
A beautifully unsettling, minimal world anchored by Scarlett Johansson’s performance, and a haunting, extraordinary score by Mica Levi (highly recommended listening).
This screening features a live pre-gig performance by pianist and composer Tim Funnell, whose work draws on jazz traditions and free improvisation, moving between structure and spontaneity in real time.
About Naked Eye Collective
Naked Eye Collective is a formation of creative individuals based in Bristol, curating immersive, cross-disciplinary events across local venues. Our aim is to tell stories that provoke, entertain, unsettle, and connect using film, sound, performance, and space itself as part of the experience.
We are interested in silent films, ecology, commerce, social critique, French cinema, and forms of storytelling that resist easy resolution. We support local artists, activate hidden venues, and build layered, interactive cultural events that sit somewhere between screening, installation, and happening.
Control + Collapse
Our current programme explores films and sound works that examine systems under pressure, where structure, reality, and authority begin to fracture under unseen or unforeseen forces.
Each screening is preceded by a live or composed sound response by a local artist.
Films in the Control + Collapse series:
Under the Skin
Ex Machina
Dogtooth
Possessor
Reality
Venue and dates TBC
This is just one strand of the wider Naked Eye programme. We’re developing multiple event series rolling out across summer and autumn.
Entry requirements: 16+
