Third place:
The Grand Budapest Hotel [director of photography Robert A. Yeoman] (117 points / 19 votes)
Second place:
The Immigrant [director of photography Darius Khondji] (133 points / 22 votes)
And the Muriel Award goes to...
Under the Skin [director of photography Daniel Landin] (163 points / 26 votes)
"The infinity of space, without shape, without color, and the iris that emerges from the shadow of that infinity. Inky, formless blacks and blinding whites, one as all-enveloping, seductive and alienating as the other, each contrasted with the irregular pinks of Caucasian flesh and the strange curving, fleshly simulacrum of female sexual imposition. These are the templates of bodily alienation and environmental detachment with which cinematographer Daniel Landin alluringly imbues the opening moments of Under the Skin. In visualizing director Jonathan Glazer’s eerily dissonant visual poem of the construction of a predatory visitor from another world (Scarlet Johansson), her (its?) muted attempt at assimilation into human rhythms and desires, and its (her?) transition from hunter to prey, Landin fuses the objective, chilled gaze of an alien intelligence with an incongruously tactile, slightly damning beauty, as the extraterrestrial visitor observes humanity scurrying through the green-and-yellow glow of night-lit Glasgow, a recognizable landscape made to seem frighteningly strange.
"Cruising the city in a van, Landin’s multiple cameras continually isolate Johansson inside the cab, further framing her in windows and in mirrors, and the fish-eyed view through the windshield resembles nothingless than a starship’s-eye-view of humanity necessarily reduced to street level, where victims, and portents of inexplicable human aggression, are quietly scrutinized by this gorgeous, glazed invader. Landin teases horror from beauty with sinuous, sinister images of passive men, too entranced by the possibility of seduction to even react to the blackness into which they sink, a sort of gelatinous sea in which they’ll remain suspended until their essence has been secreted away, leaving only a rippling, gossamer husk behind.
"Landin encourages us to resist our natural inclination to look away from one potential victim’s acromegalia and allows us, through the cool perspective of a camera which steadfastly refuses to exploit the man’s condition for anything but its humanity, to gradually understand the alien’s fascination and appreciation of one who, like her/itself, seems not to belong to this world. After deciding to spare this strangely peaceful soul, the alien considers her own countenance in a soot-smeared mirror, her beauty strange only to herself, comingling with reflected shadows, obfuscating the being’s sense of itself, muddling understanding of the contrast between what she sees, what she knows, and what she is beginning to sense. Suddenly this creature, costumed like those whom she would consume, abandons the protection of the van, puts aside her predatory mission and perhaps foolishly sets out into the natural world, where Landin’s camera subtly shifts perspective along with her.
"As the film abandons dank urbanity, it’s as if Landin’s sensitivity is quietly seized by the hovering spirit of Bill Forsyth, providing ominous grace notes and diaphanous unease to go along with the requisite pastoral splendor. Fog curls up over coastal water and with sinister purpose drifts back inland, again enveloping the creature in white as she is forced free of the protection of her vehicle. There is a lovely, long-lens-compressed tableau of drizzly Scottish country beauty, the highway upon which the alien walks, without a sense of destination or direction, winding down from the top of the frame to the bottom, past a man waiting on a corner and into the momentary protection a bus kiosk. These images of natural beauty suffused with the vaguest dread embody Landin’s expressed purpose in designing the visual scheme of the film by further contrasting a more typically benign realism with a gritty urban realityand, eventually, the fierceness and random horror of humanity acted out amongst the most serene of locations.
"This cinematographer, known mostly up till now for his work in music video (much of it in concert with Glazer) enriches his images with the totality of the world while slightly warping their contours, guides us toward an experience with the familiar as something oppressively, insinuatingly new. Beginning a seemingly inexorable descent into an ebony abyss, one victim stares at Johansson in disbelief, not over his impending doom but at her imperfectly gorgeous body and asks, “Dreaming?” She replies, with newfound empathy, “Yes, we are.” Under the Skin is a strange dream indeed, made seductively tactile, coolly menacing, and ending as it began with another horrifying contrast, black smoke rising through a lovely snowfall— testimony to the inspired ability of Daniel Landin to realize the bleak tension and ultimate sadness in Glazer’s vision of an inhuman consciousness detached from itself, groping toward epiphany and becoming unmoored in a world that for her will always be alien." ~ Dennis Cozzalio
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