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Mica Levi's haunting minimalism in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin

In the rain-slicked streets of Glasgow, Scarlett Johansson's unnamed entity drifts through a Scotland that feels like an alien's first sketch of Earth. The 2013 film "Under the Skin," adapted from Michel Faber's 2000 novel, treats its protagonist as a camera through which the audience encounters human behaviour from the outside. Mica Levi's score functions as that camera's internal mechanism, translating sensory data into a sonic language that is both familiar and deeply wrong. What makes this collaboration between Glazer and the British composer extraordinary is its refusal to behave like film music.

Levi, better known as Micachu from her band Micachu and the Shapes, arrived with a background in experimental pop and contemporary classical composition. Her selection followed Glazer's previous collaboration with Jonny Greenwood on "Sexy Beast," signalling a director with a taste for sonic risk. The result is a score that uses only a handful of musicians but generates an atmosphere of cosmic unease through dissonance, sustained tones, and unconventional string techniques that feel as though they are being pulled from some unknown dimension.

The architecture of unease

The string section is reduced to a small ensemble playing in registers that most listeners have never encountered. Glazer and Levi worked with the London Sinfonietta to record passages that include prepared strings, extreme sul ponticello bowing, and microtonal clusters hovering on the edge of audibility. These techniques are borrowed from the post-war avant-garde, from Penderecki and Ligeti, but Levi deploys them with a different purpose. Where Penderecki's "Threnody" builds to catharsis, Levi's music sustains a continuous low-grade dread that matches the film's slow accumulation of strangeness.

The score's most famous passage, heard during the beach sequence where Johansson's character first attempts to seduce a man, uses a descending arpeggio that sounds almost like a music box being slowly crushed. It is at once beautiful and nauseating, a paradox that runs through the entire soundtrack. The music does not score emotion; it scores perception, translating the alien's confused processing of human experience into sound. Without Levi, the film would lose its strangest and most necessary dimension.

A cinema of alienation

What distinguishes Levi's work from other minimalist film composers is the absence of warmth. Where Max Richter's music for "Arrival" uses swelling piano motifs to evoke wonder, or where Hildur Guðnadóttir's "Joker" relies on a single cello to convey isolation, Levi's "Under the Skin" refuses to offer any comfort. The string lines move in parallel motion that suggests both fragility and something mechanical, as if the instruments themselves are alien artifacts attempting to mimic human music.

This quality of mimicry is crucial to the film's themes. Johansson's character is learning to navigate a world whose sensory data she receives without understanding. The score mirrors this, using the vocabulary of Western art music without following its grammar. Australian viewers encountering it on SBS World Movies after its limited theatrical run would have felt the same disorientation as audiences at the Sydney Film Festival where it screened.

Local resonance down under

The film found a particularly receptive audience among Australian cinephiles, partly because the country's strong tradition of experimental film music created a context where Glazer's work could be appreciated. Australian composer David Hirschfelder, known for his scores to "Shine" and "Elizabeth," represents a more melodic tradition, but younger Australian composers working in film and installation art have cited Levi as a major influence. Programs at the Victorian College of the Arts and the Sydney Conservatorium have incorporated her techniques into their teaching, and the Australian Film Critics Association has highlighted her work in discussions of contemporary scoring.

Local critics writing for outlets like The Guardian Australia and ABC's The Screen often returned to Levi's score as the film's most distinctive achievement. One of the more interesting discussions appeared on Nicole Bartels's portfolio, where she explored the soundtrack alongside other contemporary compositions that push the boundaries of what film music can be. The Australian appetite for uncompromising art cinema, nurtured by broadcasters like SBS, has given the film an afterlife that continues to grow.

The composer's working method

Levi has discussed her approach in a number of interviews, describing a process that begins with improvisation rather than thematic development. She would record hours of material with small ensembles, then edit and layer the results to create textures that feel both composed and accidental. This method gives the score its characteristic quality of contingency, as if the listener is overhearing something rather than receiving a deliberately constructed message.

The musicians she worked with were given unusual instructions. Strings were asked to play in tunings that left the instruments sounding slightly broken, with intonation deliberately off-centre. Bowing techniques were extended to include passages played on the wrong side of the bridge or directly on the tailpiece, producing sounds that most listeners associate with malfunctioning equipment rather than performance. The result is a sound world that resists interpretation, that cannot be easily categorised as music or noise.

The legacy of restraint

Levi's subsequent work, including the score for Pablo Larraín's "Jackie" in 2016, demonstrated that "Under the Skin" was not a fluke. She has become one of the most sought-after composers in international cinema, working on a range of projects from "Monos" to the recent "Zola." Yet the "Under the Skin" score remains her most radical statement, partly because it exists in such close dialogue with Glazer's austere visual style. The film's long takes, its documentary-like approach to Johansson's character drifting through the city, and Levi's equally patient music create a synaesthetic experience that few films have achieved.

The soundtrack album released by Milan Records offers a different experience from the film itself, as the music is sequenced without the visual context and rewards close listening. Readers curious about the broader landscape of experimental film music can find more writing on this subject through https://koniecwszystkiego.com/music, which has covered a range of composers working at the edges of the form.

Defining characteristics of the score

The following elements recur throughout the work and define its unsettling character:

Other avant-garde film scores for comparison

Several other contemporary scores share Levi's experimental sensibility:

The Australian film scene, with its support for risk-taking through bodies like Screen Australia and the Melbourne International Film Festival's experimental sidebar, continues to provide a platform for the kind of work that Levi represents. As streaming services expand their catalogues of international art cinema, scores like the one for "Under the Skin" find new audiences who arrive at the music without preconceptions, hearing its strangeness for the first time. The score endures as a benchmark for what film music can accomplish when it refuses to behave, sitting in the corner of the film like an uninvited guest that refuses to leave.