5) Under the Skin

Baffling, beguiling and beautiful, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin is an elusive masterpiece. What is it about? That’s better left unsaid. The film is a sensory experience, a unique and unnerving look at humanity through the eyes of an outsider. It’s filled with images unlike any that ever been committed to celluloid before, many of which possess chilling beauty beyond words. Mica Levi’s jangling, unsettling score adds to the feeling that you’re watching a movie that may be without precedent – the birth of a new form of cinema.

Scarlett Johansson, a Hollywood sex symbol known for playing lethal ladies, delivers a performance drastically different from any you’ve ever seen her give before (or will likely give again). Her nameless wanderer is a femme fatale as well, though to group her with Natasha Romanoff would be a mistake. Here, she’s an actual black widow, an otherworldly beauty who seduces men in the wilds of Scotland, bringing them back to her dilapidated lodgings where… well, what happens isn’t exactly clear. Whatever it is, it’s both gorgeous and grotesque, frightening and fascinating.

That’s an apt way to describe the film as a whole. Glazer is devoted to the artistry of the opaque, and Under the Skin is intended to absorbed more than understood. Visually and thematically, it washes over you. Like Johansson’s character, Under the Skin is externally exquisite, but digging beneath the surface begs questions of the most universal variety. What does it mean to be human, to live, to feel, to love? Glazer’s answers, if he has any, lurk beyond the camera’s gaze. The director isn’t concerned with them – he’d rather immerse you in the mystique of it all. He knows that the most interesting puzzles of all, very much like those essential queries of our species, are the ones without an easy answer.