Beauty and the Beasts: On Director Jonathan Glazer | Features

In “Rabbit in Your Headlights,” the sense of dread is again established quickly with drivers honking at a man who is pacing the middle of a tunneled highway and yelling, “Sinner!” among other incoherent phrases. The man is hit by passing cars, each blow worse than the last, but he gets up and keeps rambling down the road. As the man has reached his maximum power, the video ends with one final car hitting him but combusting and splitting down the middle. The destroyed becomes the destroyer. In both videos, the violence and anxiety is more upfront, but because of Glazer’s eye, the camera work and visual effects, it’s hard to look away from that destruction. 

After “Sexy Beast,” Glazer’s subsequent films weren’t as bloody or vulgar, but they were nevertheless as anxiety-ridden, shocking and beautiful. The director’s 2004 follow-up “Birth” was too-casually panned because its plot revolves around Nicole Kidman’s Anna falling in love with a 10-year-old boy who says he’s the reincarnation of her dead husband. Other romantic films dealing with reincarnation might go a more hopeful or saccharine route. In contrast, “Birth” is a tense portrait of a woman who hasn’t fully grieved the death of her former husband, Sean. Those other socialites and friends who ignored Anna’s pain can’t ignore a boy who, without hesitation, says he’s Sean. 

In 2013, Glazer returned to critical acclaim with the more abstract, sci-fi thriller “Under the Skin,” starring Scarlett Johansson as an alien with a female body, roaming Scotland to dine on men in a tar-black world. Those themes of two worlds working against each other and foreboding dread are easily noticed from the outset as Johansson lures men into going home with her. Throughout the course of the movie, however, Glazer shows how the alien is grappling with and becoming more human after meeting “the deformed man,” played by Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis. The manipulative alien is shocked out of the cold indifference. Still, Glazer keeps the tension building after her character turns—a difficult task for a movie that spends most of its time showing how Johansson crinkles, snaps and crushes predatory men. 

What the imagination conjures as nightmarish monsters is nothing in comparison to those seen in Glazer’s works. Of all of them, Logan remains the director’s loudest and most brash monster, even 20 years after the debut of “Sexy Beast.” When viewed amidst the entirety of Glazer’s work, Logan is one of many unforgettable characters ready to burst from the screen and occupy your mind, rent-free. Once the façade of normalcy is broken, life is never quite as “fan-dabba-dozzy-tastic” as it seems.