I had a mostly unpleasant experience with Jonathan Glazer‘s Under The Skin during last September’s Toronto Film Festival. My negative reaction was a minority view against the current 85% Rotten Tomatoes rating. I’ll allow that festival fatigue factor can sometimes get in the way; perhaps I should see it again fresh today. Jonathan Glazer‘s film earned a “robust” $140,000 in four L.A. and NYC theaters this weekend. Maybe, but “robust” is not what this film is when you watch it. Not for me, at least.

“It is not a pleasant or welcome thing to consider the possibility that Glazer has completely lost that spark or spirit or deliciously bent perspective that informed or at least contributed to the excellence of Sexy Beast, but Under The Skin demands as much,” I wrote six months ago. “I sat there and sat there, waiting for ‘it’ to happen, for any notion of what this film might be saying or even hinting at, for anything at all to come together in my head…and nothing happened. My eyes glazed over. My spirit sank into the swamp. Trust me, Under The Skin is pretty close to torture. Torture after dropping two Percocets. Profoundly alienating — dull, meandering, murkily photographed, incoherent, nothing.”