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There are no bandages and there are definitely no goofy glasses. This confident,
modern reworking of The Invisible Man owes a lot less to Claude Rains’ classic
screen monster and much, much more to Alfred Hitchcock. With a dash of Gaslight
as well.
After Universal’s Dark Universe initiative failed spectacularly with 2017’s
big-budget action dud The Mummy, the studio stepped back from trying to launch a
cinematic universe around its classic monster characters and instead shifted to
making smaller-scale, standalone films reimagining those characters in a modern
context. That strategy is off to a good start with The Invisible Man,
writer-director Leigh Whannell’s creepy yet socially conscious take on the story
originally told in H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel, and first brought to the screen at
Universal in 1933, from director James Whale and star Claude Rains. Plot-wise,
Whannell’s version has little in common with Wells’ novel or Whale’s film, but
it continues the theme of the title character using his invisibility for
nefarious purposes.
Whannell takes that theme one step further, making his invisible man, tech mogul
Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), into a looming villain threatening the
movie’s actual main character, Adrian’s traumatized ex-girlfriend Cecilia Kass
(Elisabeth Moss). The movie opens with Cecilia mounting a carefully planned
escape from Adrian’s sprawling seaside estate, where she’s been a virtual
prisoner in an abusive relationship. She barely makes it to a car driven by her
sister Emily (Harriet Dyer) before Adrian catches up with her, smashing the car
window and swearing that she can never leave him.
Two weeks later, Adrian turns up dead, or at least appears to, and Cecilia is
surprised to discover that he’s left her $5 million in his will. Her relief at
being free of his threats proves short-lived, though, since soon she’s
experiencing unexplained disturbances at the home where she’s been staying with
her cop friend James (Aldis Hodge) and James’ teenage daughter Sydney (Storm
Reid). She pretty quickly becomes convinced that Adrian, an expert in optics
technology, has devised a way to become invisible, faking his death so that he
can continue to torment her without anything standing in his way. The more that
Cecilia insists Adrian is stalking her, the more everyone around her is
convinced that she’s losing her grip on reality.
It’s a smart and effective horror-movie reflection of the way that victims of
domestic violence are often disbelieved and dismissed, and to Whannell’s credit,
he doesn’t spend any time toying with the audience, suggesting that Cecilia
might be mentally unstable. The movie is called The Invisible Man, and it
definitely delivers on that title. Still, even if Cecilia and the audience know
that Adrian is still there, the rest of the characters don’t share that
certainty, and Whannell builds moments of suspense from the knowledge that
Adrian is lurking somewhere, waiting to strike, while most of the people in the
room deny that he’s even there.
Moss is fantastic as the frightened but determined Cecilia, who gathers all her
strength to leave Adrian at the beginning of the movie, and holds on to that
resolve no matter how much she’s doubted and pressured. Her performance is what
makes the unseen danger feel real, and Whannell makes the most of his relatively
minimal (for a major studio film) resources, scaring the audience just by
panning the camera to an empty space, and staging tense battles out of actors
flailing around in thin air. As a screenwriter, Whannell co-created the Saw and
Insidious franchises, and his previous films as a director include the decidedly
B-level genre fare of 2018’s Upgrade and the third Insidious movie. He doesn’t
abandon his pulpy genre roots here, but Invisible is more subdued than
Whannell’s earlier work, taking more time to establish Cecilia’s life and
relationships before throwing her into immediate peril.
Once she gets there, though, Invisible delivers some very entertaining
horror-movie thrills, including at least one genuinely shocking moment. The
topical commentary takes a back seat to the action in the final act, but by that
point Whannell and Moss have so clearly laid out the stakes that they don’t need
to keep reminding the audience of Cecilia’s social standing. Being chased by an
invisible psychopath is a pretty compelling motivation for anyone, and Whannell
knows when to get out of the way and let the well-crafted scares and intense
action take over.
The pounding, deeply unsettling score by Benjamin Wallfisch is clearly inspired
by famed film composer Bernard Herrmann’s work for Hitchcock. Meanwhile, in
sometimes placing us in the point-of-view of the villain, Whannell evokes the
murkiness of cinematic spectatorship, voyeurism and our complicity in the
surveillance state.
It’s exactly the kind of empathy shifting that Hitchcock used to do so well. No
matter where you land on the homage or derivative fence, there’s no denying
Whannell’s nods to Hitchcock are effective. You could also easily ignore all
that and just enjoy The Invisible Man as a tight, entertaining and visceral
popcorn thriller. It works on both levels.
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