My first instinct upon seeing Under the Skin, the latest from director Jonathan Glazer, was that I’d never seen another movie like it, not really. But then my mind filled up with comparisons, in part, no doubt, in a probably futile effort to make sense of the film I’d just watched. The film absolutely has Kubrickian ice water racing through its veins, especially in the opening sequence that apes the agonizing astral beauty of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It traffics in David Cronenberg’s brand of stiffly confrontational sexuality and resembles last year’s Shane Carruth effort, Upstream Color, in its defiant, devilish inscrutability. Hell, it actually has a few visible skin grafts lifted from Glazer’s previous film, 2004’s Birth. And yet all these lines are drawn from Under the Skin to other films are hazy and fragile, more like threads of a spider web than sturdy copper wire.

Based on a novel by Michael Faber (though I’ve no doubt that what’s on the page has only the loosest connection to what wound up on the screen), the film follows a character played by Scarlett Johansson who drives around Scotland in a white van picking up men, preferably those who clearly have no personal attachments. The promise of a sexual encounter is part of the enticement, but the common outcome is far less pleasurable than that. In relaying his tale, Glazer slips casually back and forth between the mundane (many of Johansson’s conversations have the feel of not just improvisation, but spontaneous exchange with entirely unassuming passers-by) and the highly stylistic and representational. Glazer feels only the barest need for narrative clarity, preferring elusive metaphor and unnerving visuals. In the manner of the great offbeat showmen of cinema, Glazer is committed to developing the right feel for his film. If it makes sense it the way it sets the epidermis of the viewer atingle, then it makes sense enough.

Under the Skin, then, becomes a puzzle, albeit one that hardly demands a solution. There is plenty for film school obsessives to pick over, and the whole endeavor swirls up an automatic philosophical consideration over what it means to be a human, to operate in a world too big and oppressive and confusing to properly master, despite our collective certainty that we are the overlords of this domain. It is the stuff of a thousand drunkenly earnest conversations. Truthfully, all the resulting pontificating it’s likely to inspire may not ultimately mean a thing, nor do I actually think the film has aspirations towards such heavy duty pondering. I think it is meant to be (or is at least most effective as) a simple experience, an intellectual rocky road of dreamy tactile sensations as tender and provocative as a stranger’s hand brushed across a sensitive cheek. I don’t want to solve Under the Skin. I want its mysteries to last, like the aura that lingers after looking at the sun too long, too intently.