Film music · Listening to Under the Skin
A Feeling Before a Name
Under the Skin, Mica Levi, and the awkward business of becoming someone
Written under a pen name, with generative AI assisting in exploration, drafting and editing. Not all factual claims have been independently verified. The decision to publish, and responsibility for the result, are mine.
The interval before understanding
There are feelings we recognise immediately and understand considerably later.
An attraction that arrives before we have decided whether we like somebody. A room that becomes uncomfortable without anyone saying anything obviously wrong. The peculiar exposure of being treated kindly when we had prepared ourselves for indifference.
We tend to describe these things afterwards, once language has caught up and made them presentable. While they are happening, they are often much less organised.
This is where I find a way into Mica Levi’s music for Under the Skin.
Its reputation can make it sound like something requiring specialist equipment: a grounding in twentieth-century composition, perhaps, and a reasonably sturdy nervous system. Yet beneath its strange surfaces lies something surprisingly approachable. It understands the interval between experiencing a feeling and knowing what to do with it.
For a film about an alien moving through Scotland in the borrowed appearance of Scarlett Johansson, that seems an unexpectedly familiar place to begin.
The visitor has rather more consequential problems than most of us. Nevertheless, the sensation of appearing functional while remaining privately bewildered does travel.
The music gives that bewilderment a physical presence.
Listen to the restless string writing. Tremolo—the rapid repetition of a note—can make a sustained sound shiver rather than settle. Here, that activity can feel like a surface with something moving beneath it. The music continues, but continuation offers little reassurance. There is always another small disturbance.
Then there are the pitches that refuse to sit comfortably where we expect them.
Levi has discussed using microtones: the spaces between the familiar notes of the Western twelve-note system. Describing these sounds to Jonathan Romney, they also identified something human, even comforting, within their imprecision. That matters. The score’s uneasy tuning need not suggest something entirely beyond us. It can also suggest the difficulty of getting ourselves into alignment.
Think of trying to sound relaxed when you are intensely aware of yourself. The words may be perfectly ordinary. The effort is audible somewhere around them.
That is an analogy, rather than a secret programme hidden in Levi’s composition. But it offers a useful way of listening. We do not need to translate every sound into an alien technology. Sometimes its strangeness brings us closer to a sensation we already know.
An invitation is not an understanding
There is a particular cruelty in how easily the film’s visitor can attract attention before she begins to understand what attention might mean.
Her early encounters have a procedure. She drives, approaches, speaks, assesses. The music has its own recurring materials, returning with the persistence of an operation being carried out.
Levi described the recurring three-note “capture” melody as something the character uses to draw men towards her. As the film develops, that musical tool deteriorates and becomes sadder.
What interests me is the difference between knowing how to produce a response and knowing how to share an experience.
A phrase can be learned. An appearance can be assembled. Confidence can be rehearsed in a bathroom mirror, although the mirror is rarely kind enough to provide a realistic audience.
Reciprocity is harder to practise.
The recurring melody allows us to hear that distinction. Its recognisability gives it purpose: we begin to know what kind of encounter it belongs to. But repetition also exposes its limitations. A successful invitation does not necessarily contain any understanding of the person who accepts it.
As a listener, I hear something poignant in the possibility that a musical gesture might outlive the certainty with which it was first used. The notes remain available. Their owner becomes less sure of them.
You can recognise that without having much in common with an extraterrestrial predator.
Consider the familiar experience of rereading a message you sent when you felt confident. The sentence has not changed. Somehow, everything around it has.
This is one reason the soundtrack rewards attention to small differences. A returning sound carries the memory of its earlier appearances. When its surroundings change, we hear both versions at once: what it used to promise, and what it can now sustain.
There is no requirement for a huge new melody to announce that someone has changed. Sometimes the change is audible in their inability to inhabit the old one.
When tenderness becomes possible
The score’s mixture of live instruments and synthetic sounds complicates that feeling further.
Levi described combining real strings, flute and percussion with electronic writing and artificial string sounds. They were drawn to the ability of a programmed chord to continue until the player releases it: a duration apparently freed from the ordinary limits of breath and bodily effort.
There is something quietly moving about placing that persistence beside the vulnerable activity of players.
A human being has to keep making a sound. A held electronic tone can seem to have all the time in the world.
Hearing those possibilities together, I find myself thinking about how much effort can be concealed inside an outwardly continuous existence. Someone appears composed. A conversation proceeds. The day gets done. Beneath that continuity, a great deal of adjustment may be taking place.
The soundtrack makes adjustment audible.
It also complicates the comfortable assumption that an acoustic instrument must represent authentic feeling while a synthesizer represents its imitation. Once the sounds mingle, the distinction becomes difficult to maintain by ear. An apparently artificial texture may be the thing that moves us. A recognisable instrument may feel remote.
Our emotional response arrives before we have checked its credentials.
That becomes particularly affecting around “Love”.
The title offers a familiar word, almost an instruction for how we might listen. Yet the music does not make everything suddenly straightforward. There is space to hear tenderness within its sustained textures, while still feeling uncertainty about the world those textures occupy.
For me, the tenderness comes partly from that uncertainty. A feeling has become possible. Safety has not automatically followed.
There is a temptation, when discussing this film, to organise everything into a clean passage from alien coldness to human warmth. But warmth is a complicated discovery. Wanting another person introduces needs that competence alone cannot satisfy. Curiosity creates opportunities for disappointment. Becoming receptive also means becoming reachable.
The musical question becomes more intimate: what happens when someone capable of attracting desire begins to have desires of their own?
The soundtrack lets that question remain difficult.
The name can come later
Its emotional life is also shaped by what surrounds it. Levi and sound designer Johnnie Burn worked to leave room for each other’s contributions; Levi recalled being astonished by how much the raised sound of a zip could change the drama of a shot.
I like the modesty of that detail. After all the discussion of unusual harmony and electronic transformation, a small, ordinary sound can alter the scene.
It reminds us that the score belongs to a world of bodies, clothes, surfaces and proximity. We can listen closely to the music without asking it to take responsibility for every sensation the film produces.
Perhaps that is also part of why it lingers. Its strange sounds return us to very ordinary forms of exposure: being looked at, being approached, being touched, being unable to make ourselves understood.
These are familiar experiences. Familiarity has never made them simple.
I keep returning to the possibility that the most affecting thing about Levi’s score is its patience with feelings that have not yet become legible. It allows attraction to remain troubling, tenderness to remain uncertain, and a recognisable musical phrase to carry more than one emotional history.
There is something generous in listening that way, too. We can stay with a sound before deciding exactly what it means.
For a while, something trembles. Something reaches towards warmth. We recognise the effort.
The name can come later.