Under the Skin

Invoking fellow British kitchen-sink realists Mike Leigh and Ken Loach is Carine Adler's lacerating Under the Skin. Samantha Morton (who starred as Harriet Smith in the A&E Emma and as Jane in last year's A&E Jane Eyre) tries literally to get under her skin as working-class Iris, who's first seen naked in bed inscribing childish scrawls on her body with a felt-tipped pen. She's a piece of work, all right, with her short, spiky hair, kicky clothes, and flippant anarchy. Quite a contrast to her pregnant and married sister Rose (Claire Rushbrook, from Leigh's Secrets & Lies -- and what's the deal with all these feminist films naming their characters after flowers?), with her puffy indolence and dry stick of a husband.

The pair respond with varying trauma to the death of their mother (a touching cameo by Rita Tushingham, a British cinema icon since Tony Richardson's 1961 A Taste of Honey). Rose grows distant and treacherous, but the madcap Iris sinks into an inferno of sexual excess and debasement. Donning her mother's wig and clothing, Iris rebounds from one boozy, unwise encounter to the next. Although her rake's journey seems at times a little programmed and resolves patly, Morton strips off, with excruciating honesty, layers of artifice and dissembling to uncover her character's bleeding and triumphant essence -- she calls to mind (complete with intrusions of the supernatural) Emily Watson's tour-de-force in Lars von Trier's more transcendent Breaking the Waves. Adler's film has the handheld look, dense accents, and explosive histrionics one has come to expect from such working-class British melodramas, but she brings to it the kind of urgency and inspires the sort of performances that ensure that this film is anything but skin deep. At the Avon.

-- Peter Keough