Review: Under the Skin Live, Colston Hall

Ever since its Venice Film Festival debut in September 2013, Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary sci-fi oddity Under the Skin has continued to split opinion. On the one hand hailed as an art house masterpiece, the world as seen through an extraterrestrial perspective, on the other dismissed as pretentious twaddle, it’s the sort of confounding, intoxicating experience that cult cinema is made of.

Hinging on a remarkable performance from Scarlett Johansson as an alien going clandestine on the streets of Glasgow (several of the most infamous scenes were shot candid camera style with her picking up unsuspecting men in a van), the movie merges eye-scorching surrealism with profound insights into the human condition. Are we mere bags of flesh, or is there something more elusive that defines us?

Key to the movie’s success is the unforgettable, BAFTA-nominated debut score from Mica Levi, of Micachu and the Shapes fame. It’s a critically acclaimed work that took centre stage during an electrifying live score performance at Bristol’s Colston Hall, Levi conducting the score herself and marshalling the power of the London Sinfonietta. In truth, Levi’s abstract, abrasive work is less a conventional film score (indeed, conventional is the last word that leaps to mind) and nothing less than an unnerving, captivating distillation of an alien consciousness.

Largely toiling in the lower registers in brooding, scratchy style, a careful dialogue established between the violins, violas, celli and double bass, the score glides, shrieks and churns as Johansson’s character visibly changes in front of our eyes. The score does a superb job of using harmonics and tone, rather than melody, to craft something profoundly otherwordly (a word that Levi herself dismisses). The live performance also helped draw more attention to its structure: repeated motifs include the keening, eerie string section used when Johansson’s character is on the prowl and the chilling, percussive electronic beat when she lures men to their doom.

The moments merging the disparate, warring elements of the orchestra and synths are where the score is at its best, the music buzzing and overlapping in relative unity to signal the shift from alien perspective to human compassion. The judicious use of the synths in the celebrated Love track, whereby the central character attempts intercourse for the first (and last) time are quite extraordinary, a rapturous, ecstatic merging with the undulating strings to craft something approaching human warmth but never quite getting there.

Indeed, warmth is largely absent in the score. Given it owes itself more to the concert hall works of Bartok, Penderecki and Stravinsky (one could argue the influence of Bernard Herrmann features strongly), Levi’s work felt at home in the live environment of Colston. Oftentimes film scores suffer in such an environment because they rely heavily on a symbiotic relationship with the moving image; Levi’s however is suspended above the action, a musical fever dream that says just as much without the imagery as with it. It’s not a score suitable for a casual listen but such a music event reinforces one thing absolute: Levi is a singular talent and her score is nothing less than the film’s heartbeat.