OnScreen Review: "The Invisible Man"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
Universal had grand plans for a Dark Universe, a modernized equivalent of the MCU/DCEU for their classic movie monsters. Alas, the incredibly poor performance of The Mummy with Tom Cruise dashed all of those plans, but from the ashes of it came Universal’s decision to go forward with standalone horror vehicles, eschewing a connected universe. The first of these is The Invisible Man, written and directed by Leigh Whannell and produced by Jason Blum and his Blumhouse Productions, which has put out consistently good horror movies over the last decade or so.
The origins of The Invisible Man date back to the novel by H.G. Wells in 1897. It was famously adapted into a film in 1933. More recently, Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man was based on Wells’ story. In modernizing the story, Whannell has made a woman the central character of the story; Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss), who runs away from her abusive and controlling boyfriend Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a rich scientist who specializes in optics. It’s a smart move to make the titular Invisible Man the antagonist and not the central character of the story; much like Dracula is the villain or the Xenomorph or the Predator (also invisible) are out there lurking in the dark for the victims that the story follows.
It’s likely not an accident that the film is structured the way it is, with an abusive, manipulative ex haunting and tormenting a woman in 2020, especially in light of the #MeToo movement of the past few years. However, nothing in the film ever comes across as exploitative of this moment of change. It’s actually handled smartly. While the bare bones of the story comes from Wells as the source material, the film equally owes a lot to movies like George Cukor’s Gaslight and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby; even Steven Soderbergh’s recent Unsane deals with some similar themes.
Gaslighting, of course, has become a popular phrase in recent years, and comes from Gaslight, where a man manipulates things around a woman to make her think she is losing her mind. Here, Cecilia, after escaping from Adrian and also traumatized by how he treated her and controlled her, is told of his apparent suicide. When odd things begin to happen after, they make Cecilia suspect that Adrian is not dead and that he is somehow maneuvering unseen to ruin her life. And of course, with the suicide, nobody believes her, which isolates her from the few people she has in her life.
The film is effective in creating a tense domestic horror thriller. It cultivates a stillness and attentiveness in the viewer that felt akin to what A Quiet Place achieved in capturing the attention of the audience and drawing them in. There is never a doubt in the viewer’s mind that Cecilia is not going crazy, not just because of the movie title but because of what we see Adrian doing as he’s invisible. That doesn’t make the few jump scares the film has up its sleeve any less effective though.
Elisabeth Moss has excelled over the last decade in great TV roles (Mad Men, Top of the Lake, The Handmaid’s Tale) and in several acclaimed indie films (The One I Love, Listen Up Philip, Queen of Earth, and Her Smell). A juicy supporting role in 2019’s Us and now the lead in this film may be enough to propel her into more mainstream success. Whether it is as Peggy on Mad Men, June in The Handmaid’s Tale, or here as Cecilia, Moss excels in resisting the patriarchy.
The film was made for a very low $7 million, but it does not look cheap in the least. The only place the small budget shows up is in the casting of Adrian. Oliver Jackson-Cohen portrays Adrian, and while it is not a role that requires a big name actor given the lack of actual screen time for the character, it does come across like the villain was one of the places they felt they could cut corners on to save some money. A slightly more recognizable actor might have helped with the conclusion of the film, which doesn’t quite doesn’t quite rise to the level of the climax of the film that immediately precedes it.
Overall, though, The Invisible Man is a fine horror flick, full of tension and jumps, and a few twists. It does a tremendous job being an overt illustration of toxic masculinity and how damaging, traumatizing, and problematic abusive relationships can be. It’s another feather in the cap for Blumhouse.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars