Yet while Under The Skin shares certain elements with those earlier films, it’s far more intimate, disturbing and powerful than all of them put together. Scarlett Johansson plays Laura, an almost silent femme fatale who roams the streets of Glasgow picking up men and kidnapping them for her own obscure and deadly ends. What is plain is just how unsettling Johansson’s scenes of quiet seduction are. It’s said that some of the men who clamber into Laura’s Ford Transit van aren’t actors, but ordinary members of the public who were filmed in secret and only informed of their involvement in a movie later on, which explains why the dialogue seems so natural and strangely voyeuristic. These scenes of are undoubtedly powerful because they’re so unusual. We’ve become conditioned to expect women to be the victims – or at least to be objects of desire – in movies. It’s extremely rare to see this situation reversed, where it’s the men who are presented as lacking in control, or helpless, or unaware of what’s about to happen to them. One or two sequences provide glimpses of the surreal fate that awaits Laura’s victims, and they’re almost breathtaking in their sheer weirdness. The themes and meaning of Glazer’s film can be thought about and discussed at length, and certainly deserve to be. The obvious thing to take from Under The Skin is that it’s about the fleshy carnality of being a human in the modern age. Long stretches of the film take place against a depressingly familiar British backdrop of chain stores – of H Samuel and Next and Boots, of family pubs offering two breakfasts for £10 – the kind of places you can find in any generic city up and down the country. It touches on the anonymity of modern living, of how we judge one another superficially, by appearances, without knowing or particularly caring what dark reservoirs of emotion – or worse, absence of emotion – might lie beneath. Glazer, whose previous films include Sexy Beast and Birth, is on very different territory here, channelling the high-contrast minimalism of George Lucas’ debut feature THX 1138, the otherworldliness of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth, and the icy sexuality of David Cronenberg’s Crash. Under The Skin is a difficult, incredibly disturbing film from beginning to end, but that’s why it’s also a brilliant one. Some cinemagoers will almost certainly find its lack of a relatable protagonist, or an obvious story structure, or even character motivations frustrating, and in many ways, Glazer’s film’s like Shane Carruth’s similarly obscure Upstream Color. But movies should show us new things, or take us to strange places we’re reluctant to visit, and Under The Skin does exactly this. It feels like something from a nightmare; a horrifying portrait of the id. Under The Skin is out in UK cinemas on the 14th March. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.