Name: Control + Collapse: Under the Skin — pre-gig by Tim Funnell
Start: 2026-06-14T06:30:00+01:00
Location: SouthBank Club

$Control + Collapse: Under the Skin \u2014 pre-gig by Tim Funnell$

SouthBank
Dean Lane, Southville,
BS3 1DB
Doors are at 5.30 pm
Event start 6.30pm
Event ends 9.30pm
Under the Skin is a low-key sci-fi by Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, The Zone of Interest). It follows an alien (Scarlett Johansson) moving through Glasgow in her van, where she seduces men not into companionship, but into a black, nebulous void, an encounter with something never fully explained or revealed.
These men are taken and processed as part of a larger, unseen system, an operation that, in the original novel by Michel Faber, connects back to her home planet, where human bodies are harvested and consumed as a resource. Glazer’s adaptation keeps this logic just out of reach, reframing it as something abstract, unknowable, and slightly eerie: a world of quiet extraction, operating without visible cause or consequence.
While never fully explained, a figure moves in the background. He is associated with the alien, appearing after she kills a man on a beach to erase traces of her existence. Known as the Motorcycle Man, he is an eerie presence - observing, tracking, closing distance.
After an unexpected fall in the street, she is helped by strangers and begins to experience something unfamiliar: empathy. Something has shifted. When later examined by the Motorcycle Man, she is assessed and ultimately allowed to continue, her presence still intact within the system, but no longer entirely defined by it.
She is no longer only operating within the logic she arrived with; she is beginning to feel her way into something closer to humanity. This shift opens a threshold where identities blur—what is beneath the alien’s skin, and what has been there all along beneath ours.
A beautifully unsettling, minimal world anchored by Scarlett Johansson’s performance, and a haunting, extraordinary score by Mica Levi (highly recommended listening).
This screening features a pre-gig performance by pianist and composer Tim Funnell, whose work draws on jazz traditions and free improvisation, moving between structure and spontaneity in real time.
Tickets are £11.00
https://hdfst.uk/e155290