2013 Cannes Film Festival Predictions: Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin

#19. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin

Gist: Based on Michel Faber’s 2000 novel, this is about Isserley (Scarlett Johansson), an extraterrestrial sent to Earth by a rich corporation on her planet to pick up unwary hitchhikers.

Prediction: Glazer’s films aren’t as ostentatious, sweeping, or grand as a PTA or Malick film, but they come around just as often (we’ll just ignore Malick’s hyperactivity of late for the sake of this point), and in their own ways are just as accomplished – Glazer was, after all, earning Kubrick comparisons before Anderson ever did. So there was a hushed chorus of agonized #TeamGlazer members last year when the 2012 fall festival circuit came and went with no sign of Under the Skin. There’s still a discomforting lack of news on the film save for its high placement on everybody’s Cannes prognostications, and nobody knows where it is in its production stage. With Glazer’s other two features, Sexy Beast and Birth, having dropped in TIFF and Venice (respectively), he may feel more comfortable presenting this new one in one of those fests in the fall. If he wants to give Cannes a try, though, we suspect this will absolutely be given a slot in the Main Competition.