The to-date best movie of 2020, Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man is a smart, sleek thriller, and one with surprising psychological gravitas. Elizabeth Moss, the go-to for characters fraying under duress, etches out a compelling portrait of a domestic abuse victim trying to put her life together while suffering from relationship PTSD. Oh, and being stalked by her invisible ex in a thoughtful update of H.G. Welles’ 1897 classic. In this new version,
When we first meet terrorized Cecilia (Moss), she’s hatching an escape from the elaborate, modernist cliffside home where she lives with her tech-bro billionaire, a toxic masculine manipulator and abuser named Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). In Cecilia’s middle of the night flight, Moss superbly conveys, through desperation and paranoia, how much is at stake.
After a perilous yet successful getaway, Cecilia goes into deep cover, staying with her best friend, James, (terrific Aldis Hodge), a detective with a teen daughter (Storm Reid). But while she’s physically escaped her abuser, Adrian’s presence remains. One of the picture’s masterstrokes is giving Cecilia the space to deal with putting her life back together while every benign detail, around every corner, feels threatening. That’s a very real fear for crime victims, of course, and the picture doesn’t pull punches around Cecilia’s insecurities.
Then, a revelation—Cecilia is shocked to learn that Adrian has abruptly died, leaving her part of his fortune. She reluctantly accepts, yet no matter how much she tries to acclimate to her new life, she has the uneasy feeling that his suspicious, controlling gaze is never far away. Whannel does well creating an atmosphere of tension in the mundane, where even a chair in a bedroom takes on ominous menace.
Has he returned as a ghost? Or reappeared in some different capacity? Is Cecilia imagining things? Is Adrian just gaslighting her on another level? Though deceased, has the formerly renown optics trailblazer found a way to stalk her anew? Or just maybe perfected a novel method of going undetected, even at arm’s length?
At times calling to mind Sleeping with the Enemy and The Entity in its victim’s paranoia and supernatural, stranger-in-the-house menace, Whannell, the prolific genre screenwriter, actor and director behind both the Saw and Insidious franchises (with collaborator James Wan), has become quite a sophisticated, knowing filmmaker, and takes quite a step up in the emotional stakes this time.
The Invisible Man reminds us that what’s in the dark, or what we cannot see, which can plays tricks with our imagination, and which have the potential for an invasion of personal boundaries and privacy, is primal and can both scare us and kill us. Additionally, there are two other jolts here. The first, about midway, involves a bucket of paint and musical stinger that comes at the end of a suspense sequence set in an attic, and is a primo delayed gratification thrill with judicious use of CGI; the second, a wholly unexpected twist murder.
Whannell and Moss have their priorities straight – never in this admittedly high-concept picture is Cecilia’s emotional plight sidelined by special effects. Instead, Whannell uses the premise and tech to chart Cecilia’s tenuous, shivery line between fear of madness and incredulity at what she knows is happening, even when no one will believe her. In this regard she becomes a classic, wrongly accused Hitchcockian antihero.
The second half of the picture, once it’s revealed what is actually happening, is that of a moderately scaled and technically proficient thriller driven by the central theme of gaslighting, a heady topic for a remake of a 1933 Universal monster movie (complete with a quick nod to Claude Rains in a most clever hospital scene), an elegant cat-and-mouse suspenser with surprising twists.
Whannell’s last picture, Upgrade, was a loving amalgam of Robocop and The Terminator, a slick machine that felt it could easily have been released in 1985, and probably to a larger audience. Both picture indicate he has evolved into a terrifically thoughtful and aesthetically powerful filmmaker. The Invisible Man is a powerhouse showcase for Moss and example of how rich a “genre” performance and picture can be when contextualized in the real world, which has always been a staple of great sci-fi, which has the latitude to explore the human condition perhaps like no other genre. While this picture is not on the order of philosophical treatises like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Blade Runner (few films are), it has substance, impeccable technique and real scares.
4 stars.
