A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr.
Much more than an overview of a filmography; it’s a thoughtful, at-times poetic consideration of how one of today’s most formally daring auteurs grapples with the darkest corners of the human condition….”
Seeing Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin on the big screen remains one of the most indelible theater-going experiences I’ve had. The first shot alone—in which a pinprick of light punctuates the center of a black void and explodes into an iris-like orb, all accompanied by composer Mica Levi’s frenzied violins—pinned me to my seat. I’d never seen anything quite like it before in a mainstream film. It made my heart race.
This scene also encapsulates what writer John Bleasdale considers a key characteristic of the English writer-director’s style: a concern with darkness not only “as a tangible presence” (9) but also as “an edginess in tone that … [doesn’t] pander to audience expectation” (29). Such darkness—simultaneously visual and thematic, literal and figurative—permeates Bleasdale’s Darkness Visible: The Cinema of Jonathan Glazer (Sticking Place Books, 2025). The book is therefore much more than an overview of a filmography; it’s a thoughtful, at-times poetic consideration of how one of today’s most formally daring auteurs grapples with the darkest corners of the human condition.
If you’re wondering how a whole book can be dedicated to a director who has made “only” four features, consider Glazer’s prolific (and often iconic) work outside the multiplex. An early chapter, for example, dissects all ten of his music videos (the short entries read like capsule reviews). Such explications accomplish a few things. First, they illustrate Bleasdale’s refusal to lazily deify his subject (he doesn’t mince words when referring to the music video for Richard Ashcroft’s “A Song for the Lovers” as “an exercise in style, well executed, but self-consciously unimportant” [81]). And second, they identify and examine motifs that would help define the director’s long-form projects (the tunnel setting for Unkle’s “Rabbit in Your Headlights” anticipates Glazer’s use of tunnels as “thresholds … between life and death, between comfort and annihilation” [78] in Birth and The Zone of Interest).
The trajectory of Glazer’s commercial work, covered in two chapters (the first focusing on 1995-2006; the other, somewhat confusingly, on 2000-2024), also shows the development of what would become his signature style. Bleasdale traces “the guerilla-style filmmaking that would later define Under the Skin” to a 1997 TV spot for Nike that captures football stars practicing “in a … public space [Hackney Marshes], surrounded by unsuspecting locals” (23). And his early pieces for AT&T, with their “symmetrical, almost architectural” (22) framing, already exude an indebtedness to Stanley Kubrick that still informs his work today.
For proof positive that great directors can “elevate the form into something akin to short-form cinema” (20), look no further than “The Surfer,” Glazer’s genre-expanding Guinness commercial in which black-and-white ocean waves erupt into a stampede of wild horses. Or 2002’s “Odyssey” for Levi’s: a 60-second adrenaline shot that follows a young man and woman running “full-tilt through the walls of an apartment building, crashing through brick and plaster” (137). Fans will already be familiar with many of these examples (“The Surfer” has surely joined the ranks of Ridley Scott’s “1984” as a masterpiece of the form), but Bleasdale throws in some lovely curveballs. An unaired spot for Cadbury’s Flake, for instance, shows a satanic figure (Denis Lavant) wooing a bunch of horny, white-gowned cultists with the phallic chocolate bar. “The ad has since resurfaced online,” the author explains, “earning cult admiration” (143). I get the appeal. The commercial is absolutely batshit (and beautifully shot, of course). I watched it, rapt, at least five times in a row.
Each of Glazer’s features gets its own chapter. Whether he’s juxtaposing the insane ramblings of Sexy Beast’s Don (Ben Kingsley) with those of King Lear (both love repeating “No!”), elucidating Birth’s indebtedness to The Shining (“both films are, in their own way, poems to snow” [111]), tackling the question of human (or animal) consciousness in Under the Skin, or coming to terms with his own discomfort toward watching Holocaust “entertainments” like The Zone of Interest, Bleasdale often finds new, invigorating ways to approach them all. These chapters are also where the author’s own style really gets to sing: Kingsley’s Don has “a head like an alopecia-stricken testicle” (44); Birth’s reincarnation narrative “becomes plausible not through philosophy but through need” (130); and the poor man whose skin floats beneath Under the Skin’s black death pool is compared to “a supermarket carrier bag drifting under the Irish Sea among the jellyfish” (170). The prose is both erudite and lyrical, making Darkness Visible a pleasure to read for its philosophical insights and aesthetics alike.
The author is the first to admit that his text is less a defense of a single thesis than a collection of reflections—“this book is meant as an exploration and an appreciation, not an argument” (12), he clarifies in the introduction—though his focus on visual and thematic darkness lends a cohesiveness to what otherwise could have felt like a meandering essay collection. Toward the end of the last chapter, he masterfully gathers the four features under a shared ethos: “The darkness will always remain—buried in the murder pits of the past [The Zone of Interest], or under the swimming pool of a criminal’s getaway [Sexy Beast], or locked inside a loveless marriage [Birth], or a derelict house in Glasgow [Under the Skin]. … Glazer forces us to confront it—and also to see ourselves seeing it” (240). Bleasdale helps us see it, too.
As I read Darkness Visible, my mind kept returning to that opening shot of Under the Skin. It wasn’t just its unpredictability that affected me so deeply (after all, something can be unexpected but ineffective, new but hollow); it was also the feeling of danger that went along with it. It’s like witnessing a balletic highwire act that can end in disaster at any moment, but somehow doesn’t. And for my money, Glazer—a tightrope walker high up in a black void, illumined by a single, piercing spotlight—has yet to stumble.
Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema with Wallflower Press.