D: Jonathan Glazer. S: Jonathan Glazer, Walter Campbell. Novel: Michel Faber. P: James Wilson, Nick Wechsler. Cast: Scarlett Johansson. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Studio Canal.

The kind of film for which a written review proves wholly inadequate. Under the Skin simply has to be seen, to remind us what cinema can be in the right hands. It’s breathtaking: aesthetically pure, frighteningly abstract, thrillingly enigmatic. Next to Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), it may be the most original adaptation of a source novel ever filmed. Fans of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel approached the film version with some trepidation; advance word from Cannes was good – more than good – but then came the teaser trailer: Scarlett Johansson as a red-lipped succubus seemed a far cry from the novel’s scarred and embittered anti-heroine. Rumours that the action had been switched from the remote Highlands to central Glasgow were likewise worrying. With all these changes, it seemed Faberites should prepare for disappointment.

Cast all such worries straight from your mind. Under the Skin is a flat-out masterpiece, a work of startlingly austere beauty. Of the original novel, only the barest trace of the central premise remains: an extraterrestrial predator in human form picks up single men and kills them, before being eventually destroyed herself. That’s it. Where the novel focusses brilliantly on the inner psychology of the alien woman (Isserley in the book, but unnamed* here), and her harrowing descent into isolation and self-loathing, the film steps back to regard the events with a disturbingly clinical eye, leaving the character’s motivation and emotions an enigma for the viewer to solve.

There are probably no more than ten scripted lines of dialogue in the whole film. The story unfolds through a succession of beautiful and puzzling images, beginning with a striking montage of concentric circles: a tiny point of light in an all-black screen resolves itself into a view of the sun seen from the blackness of space, then into a sequence of planets gliding into position, then finally into a close shot of a human iris. Over this collage we start to hear a woman’s voice, uttering strange repeated phrases; only later do we realise we’ve witnessed an alien being’s arrival on earth.

We cut to an empty country lane at night. A man dressed in motorcycle leathers carries the body of a young woman from a field, into the back of a waiting van. Another cut takes us into a blinding white limbo, impossibly vast. The dead girl is lying on the floor; another woman, naked, stands over the body and methodically strips her, donning her clothes. Her disguise complete, the woman (Scarlett Johansson) drives off in the van, and proceeds to prowl the streets of Glasgow at night, searching for unattached men. With the promise of sex she lures them back to a series of different, apparently derelict houses; inside is a gleaming black limbo of polished glass, which turns into a quagmire of tar when the men try to follow her into the darkness. The men are reduced to jelly-like bags of flesh, before being sucked dry by some awful, unseen mechanism. The alien soon develops a successful routine, the crime scenes being cleared of all evidence by the mysterious motorcyclist. But a disguise worn too long can stop being a costume, and start to become the real thing…

Scarlett Johansson is a total knockout. Her presence hits you like a punch to the gut: with Under the Skin she proves she’s just as great a screen goddess as Elizabeth Taylor or Ava Gardner in their prime. With or without her clothes she’s heart-stoppingly gorgeous, a woman you can easily imagine walking (no, running) to your death for. Her phenomenal good looks are backed by real talent, too – her transition from cold, inhuman predator to bewildered child, as her human disguise grows increasingly to possess her, is quietly, subtly heart-breaking.

This is a film of coolly understated effects, despite some occasionally extreme physical imagery. Walking down a crowded Glasgow high street, Johansson stumbles and falls; then lies face-down, frozen in confusion, like a doll whose strings have been cut. She has to be helped back to her feet by concerned passers-by, and wanders off in a daze. A later kindness extended by another stranger leads her, haltingly, to attempt a tender sexual encounter – which she finds (abruptly, and humiliatingly) she is unequipped to consummate. She has no way to respond but to stand with her face to the bedroom wall, frozen in shock. It’s almost unbearably poignant. (Is she a living being, or an automaton which acquires limited self-knowledge? Either explanation works; with a film this abstract, trying to nail down specifics is pointless in any case.)

Director Jonathan Glazer (and co-writer Walter Campbell) have fashioned a true modern classic. In some ways it has more in common with Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) than with Michel Faber, though that’s not to diminish the influence of the original author; it is, rather, an attempt to emphasize that Glazer’s Under the Skin is very much a work of cinema, where mood and image reign supreme. Incredibly, Under the Skin is only Glazer’s third film (after the scabrous Sexy Beast [2000], and the deeply strange Birth [2004]). On the evidence of this film, the man is some kind of prodigy. He’s ably served by a first-rate crew, though special mention must be made of Mica Levi’s unsettling score, which alternates between scrabbling, strangled violins and the kind of minimalist plings one associates with Japanese kabuki theatre. (It’s her only score to date, but it surely won’t be her last.)

So the film’s good – but is it as good as the book? It’s every bit as strange, and in some ways more unsettling. Replicating the book’s events in only a couple of vague particulars, the film succeeds in capturing the novel’s uniquely disturbing quality to an uncanny degree. An adaptation more faithful to the text could still be a powerful piece of cinema, but in stripping the source back to its basic components Glazer has managed to stamp his own distinct signature on the material, creating in the process an elegant and fascinating companion piece to Faber’s unforgettably grim study.

Readers of the book will have noted already the divergence from Isserley’s MO; in the novel, she trawled the Highlands picking up lonely hitchers who wouldn’t be missed, dispatching them with a specially-rigged anaesthetic seat. Here the kills are chillingly surrealistic, taking place in an endless hallway paved in black glass. None of the alien backstory, with its political commentary, has survived the transition to the screen. Even the main protagonist remains a nameless abstraction. Where the novel dwells on uncomfortable physical detail, the film elects for hallucinatory realism. Perhaps, in another ten years, somebody else will go back to the book and film it straight. This reviewer will be one of the first in line; but for now, we have this unutterably strange and mesmerising vision to puzzle over and admire.

*It’s worth noting that the production crew did give the character a name (“Laura”), presumably just to make life easier on the set; “Nameless Freaky Alien Girl” takes longer to type on the call-sheets.