If Bugonia got under your skin - with its deadpan weirdness, corporate chill, and that outsider gaze - there's one film you need to queue up next. Jonathan Glazer (movies and tv series)'s Under the Skin, the $13M sci-fi stunner starring Scarlett Johansson (movies and tv series), is the colder, stranger mirror Bugonia keeps glancing at. Different vibe, same haunting question: what do humans look like when you don't see them as human?
Why Bugonia Fans Should Watch Under the Skin
- Both stories work from the outside-in - an alien eye measuring us, testing us, coolly recording what we are.
- Desire and extraction sit at the core. In one film it's corporate; in the other, it's cosmic. Either way, people are resources.
- They're sensory experiences first, plot machines second. You feel your way through them.
- Sound isn't background here - it's the main carrier of meaning, especially in Glazer's film.
Under the Skin Is a Spiritual Experience
On the surface, it's simple: an alien roams Scotland in a van, lures men, and they vanish into a black, silent void. But that's just the hook. What stays with you is the feeling of watching humanity from a distance, like you're learning the species in real time.
Glazer leans into that distance. Many interactions were shot with hidden cameras, so everyday people become part of this eerie study. You're not following "a character" as much as inhabiting a cold, curious consciousness that's testing the edges of empathy - and short-circuiting when it feels something real.
Johansson plays the "program" with tiny signals: the way she listens, the way silence stretches, the blank hunger in the seduction scenes. And then, one day, the machine flinches. Kindness gets in. That's when the film opens up, quietly and painfully.
Sound Design Did the Heavy Lifting
Under the Skin barely talks. It listens. Sound designer Johnnie Burn built an audio world that lets us slip into the alien (movies and tv series) mind and then pushes us back out again. Street noise, car hiss, quick chatter - they're warped, clipped, and weirdly damp, like reality itself is misfiring.
Burn has said this film changed the way he works, and you can hear that approach later in Glazer's The Zone of Interest. As he put it: "I discovered that I liked using real sounds, mixing them, and telling a story with them. I was amazed at how powerful sound can be - it can tell a story and convey emotion or subtext. With Under the Skin, I discovered how I wanted to create sound."
Mica Levi (movies and tv series)'s score is the alien's inner pulse - twitchy, hypnotic, almost clinical during the lures. Not sexy. Functional. So when empathy slips in, the audio armor cracks. The beach. The kindness of strangers. The noise of the human world flooding a system built to stay cold.
Two Films, Same Cold Look at Humanity
Bugonia filters this same idea through corporate satire. Two conspiracy-minded guys kidnap a pharma CEO because they're sure she's an alien plotting extinction. Whether Emma Stone (movies and tv series)'s Michelle actually is extraterrestrial - the film has fun keeping that question alive - the system she runs behaves like one: efficient, extractive, and detached from human pain.
In Glazer's film, the alien fails because she feels too much. In Bugonia, the corporate machine fails because it can't feel enough. Both reach the same point from opposite ends: empathy breaks the loop, and that break is messy.
There's a moment in Under the Skin - a montage of people just living - that hits like a confession. The alien sees us as noise, then as bodies, and finally as lives. That shift costs her everything. It's the quiet cousin to Bugonia's chaotic, escalating finale.
Here's the takeaway
If Bugonia left you buzzing about what we look like under scrutiny, Under the Skin is the source code. It's stranger, simpler, and somehow heavier. Watch it alone, lights low, and let the sound tell you what the words don't.
For credits and release details, see Under the Skin on IMDb. For Burn and Glazer's later collaboration, check out The Zone of Interest at A24.
