Leigh Whannell’s contemporary revision of H.G. Wells’ famous novel, most notably filmed as the beloved, deeply eccentric James Whale adaptation for Universal Pictures in 1933, offers a sci-fi horror crossbreed that begins with a galvanising sequence pointedly lacking any sci-fi or horror elements. Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) awakens in the middle of the night in bed beside her abusive and dominating partner, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in his pristine modernist mansion, and begins enacting a carefully crafted escape plan involving sleeping pills in Adrian’s nightstand glass of water, pre-packed and hidden belongings, and shutting down the elaborate security system. Only a pause to try and free their pet dog from a shock collar causes the plan to break down as she accidentally sets off a car alarm. She manages to reach a rendezvous on the nearest road where her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer) drives up, and the flee in panic after Adrian runs up to their car and smashes his hand through the window in a whirl of blind fury.
Cecilia takes refuge with her friend and cop James Lanier (Aldis Hodge) and his teenaged daughter Sydney (Storm Reid), and as she begins recuperating from her traumatised and deeply uneasy state she receives word from Adrian’s lawyer brother Tom (Michael Dorman) that Adrian has committed suicide and she’s received a large portion of his estate, as she was still in his will. Cecilia accepts the legacy and vows to help Sydney finance her fashion school dreams. After she signs the necessary paperwork, she soon finds her life going awry as she hears strange noises in the night, and bewildering events start fraying her few relationships. Cecilia gradually comes to realise Adrian, whose fortune is based on his groundbreaking research into optics, has found a way of making himself invisible and is using it with steady and relentless art to torment her until she caves into his will once more or goes mad, whichever comes first.
Whannell, an Australian actor turned writer, hit the big time in Hollywood through penning the trashy but hugely successful gore spectacle Saw (2004) and its sequels, and made his directing debut on Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015). With his subsequent works Upgrade (2018) and now The Invisible Man, Whannell has posited himself as a maker of intense, relatively minimalist B-movies dressing up familiar genre plots with very now ideas and mischievously nasty, twist-riddled storytelling, as if seeking to wedge himself in the zone exactly halfway between John Carpenter and Christopher Nolan. Whannell’s distant take on Wells retains the surname of his novel’s antihero but renders the character essentially a void, an omnipresent threat to Cecilia: Whannell emphasises this aspect when, even during that opening scene, he carefully avoids showing Adrian’s face, rendering him already obscure and abstract, an emblem of brutish menace. As in Upgrade Whannell exploits a tension between the glacial chic of contemporary architecture and the amoral prophets of tech inhabiting them, cooking up perversions to body and spirit, and a grittier, far more palpable universe beyond such realms where rather more frail people contend with those perversions.
The Invisible Man sports a zeitgeist-fit theme in depicting a woman contending with an injuriously controlling man, delivered with some wit apparent on a conceptual level in tackling a basic tale of gaslighting – systematic efforts to make someone think they’re unstable or insane for the sake of manipulating them, after Patrick Hamilton’s twice-filmed play Gaslight – with the invisibility added as genre cream, the perfect device of cruel undermining. But The Invisible Man actually feels more connected to films like Demon Seed (1977) and The Entity (1981) than to other they’re-trying-to-drive-me-mad tales, as those films also offered specific depictions of feminine nightmares about home intrusion, isolation, and violation delivered through genre metaphors. Where the Invisible Man figure is usually associated with a note of ironically frustrated megalomania, the protagonist convinced he can rule the world with his new-sprung power only to find himself caged by tiny but tell-tale traces, the Renaissance man who erases his exterior identity and loses his interior identity too, Whannell reduces the scope here to a domestic drama. Considering how many genre movies have overblown stakes these days this choice has its agreeable side, but also suggests how shrunken contemporary imaginative pallets have become: this Invisible Man’s ambitions are ridiculously petty considering the power he’s achieved. Most criminally, Whannell strips away all hint of the tragic contradictions inherent in the property he’s making over.
Whale made his Invisible Man the tragicomic interlocutor for the director’s own roguishly subversive sensibility, tugging at the whiskers of the world or shivving it in the ribs per whim. By contrast, Whannell’s Adrian Griffin emerges less as the personification of twisted masculinity than a device and metaphor for Whannell’s own bloodthirsty but glumly mechanistic showmanship, as the director shows off like a magician teasing with elements of his tricks, particularly when he obliges Cecilia and audience alike to find an array of belongings including a sharp kitchen knife and ponder what use they’re intended for. Like Upgrade, The Invisible Man unfolds in compelling manner and only when it all adds up did I feel short-changed. It might in part be the film’s shallowness as character drama: Cecilia is as blankly emblematic a survivor as Adrian is an abuser, with cutely tepid depictions of her and James and Sydney being nice and domestic and story pretexts that feel like animated hashtags. Whannell’s visual style, whilst clean and poised, also curiously lacks flavour, his environs like his characters acting as signposts rather than proving truly intricate and organic.
Whannell repeatedly signals directorial strategies with long, lingering pans onto empty rooms and corridors as if to suggest unseen and menacing presences and make the audience crane for a glimpse of some goosebump-provoking manifestation, like a more elaborate take on the Paranormal Activity films. But after a while it proves he’s too inattentive to make these strategies pay off, settling instead for standard jump scares and lurking killer shtick, and the storyline begins to fall apart long before it reaches its stunt ending. The Invisible Man avoids the harder work inherent in its storyline in offering a substantial glimpse of Adrian and Cecilia’s relationship. This means that when Cecilia tells James that “This is what he does – he makes me feel like I’m the crazy one,” she seems to be speaking less of a specific liaison than underlining a readily digestible chunk of rhetorical bait for viewers. Whannell removes all ambiguity from Cecilia’s situation: we the audience are never required to wonder if Cecilia is really crazy, and Cecilia herself is delivered from doubt very quickly too.
It’s obvious why Whannell cast Moss in the lead role. She’s a potent performer who currently inhabits a very specific niche as the emblematic female victim/avenger du jour in pop culture, and she gives us suffering Cecilia in all her bloodshot, sallow-skinned glory. But it seemed to me like the role needed a performer with a different cachet, someone who invites underestimation from the outset. Moss never seems so malleable or downtrodden as the role of tormented trophy requires: it never seems that unlikely that Cecilia can win out. Whannell does keep you guessing just how and when he’s going to deliver the payoff, and it comes when that sharp knife is used to jolting, impudent, bloody effect, in a manner reminiscent of the United Nations stabbing in North by Northwest (1959) as Cecilia is deftly framed for a gruesome crime before many witnesses. Whannell’s best sequence comes right at the start, free of any gimmickry, his real talent as a suspense-monger plain in conjuring tension whilst trusting the audience to grasp what's going on with very little information. It’s only when he ventures beyond that he runs into trouble.
There’s one strong interpersonal scene as Cecilia realises Tom knows full well Adrian is alive and is doing his bidding, announcing to him acid contempt she’s withdrawing any sympathy she had for him as another thrall of the monster. The plot gains some urgency as Cecilia learns she’s pregnant despite her attempts to avoid it with Adrian, just after Adrian’s machinations have landed her in an insane asylum, and Tom communicates the offer to get her released if she agrees to return to Adrian and have the child with him. As a plot manoeuvre this scarcely makes sense given how effectively Adrian stitched Cecilia up by this point: Adrian would have to either reveal himself to stand any chance of getting her released or arrange her escape using invisibility and keep her in hiding forever. Indeed, the whole course of what Adrian does cuts against the grain of what we’re assured he’s obsessed with, in trying to destroy rather than possess Cecilia. Of course, Cecilia has no intention of going through with such a deal, and her method of exposing Adrian hinges on her willingness to do damage to herself to bait Adrian.
The worm finally turns but Whannell loses control when she does so, as his evil genius suddenly does stupid things to allow the last act to happen, and ploughs through a gang of security guards like he’s a champion martial artist as well as a monomaniacal lab technician. The special effects are strong and employed with commendable restraint, and certainly contrast the flashy hoopla of Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man (1999), the last major Hollywood spin on this sort of thing, although that at least delivered a more entertaining film. The climax, whilst it incorporates the invisibility device Adrian has created, likewise tries to play out more cleverly than spectacularly and keep its feet on the ground. That doesn’t mean I think it really works, depending just a little much on things going exactly as Cecilia wants them to, on top of being anticlimactic and visually flat. The final shots make Moss recreate the cover of a few thousand DVD boxes of her The Handmaid’s Tale series, wielding the same expression of newly leonine defiance: marketing as dramatic shorthand, and vice versa.
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