Unlike many iterations before it, The Invisible Man in the cultural climate of 2020 shifts perspective from the visibility-impaired scientist at the center of the narrative. Rather, the protagonist in Leigh Whannell’s umpteenth interpretation of the classic novel is a woman being menaced by the titular unseen fellow to whom she’s inextricably tied. It’s more Hollow Man than Memoirs of an Invisible Man, minus those films’ boffo special effects that ever-frugal production company Blumhouse was just never going to shell out for anyway. This Man’s left to work with what it doesn’t got while simultaneously playing on some real-deal social anxieties. And it’s a better thriller for it.
Cecilia Kass (the intense and teary Elisabeth Moss) drugs her husband Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, appropriately barely there) and steals away from their high-tech San Francisco compound in the middle of the night. Kass is liberating herself from the abusive, violent tendencies of the controlling, narcissistic Griffin, who just so happens to be the leading scientific mind in the field of optics. After weeks of coping with agoraphobic-level PTSD in hiding, Kass learns that Griffin has committed suicide and, suspiciously, she stands to inherit $5 million from his estate. As Griffin’s attorney and brother Tom (Patriot’s Michael Dorman, once again blue-suited, the puffiness of age now somehow turning him into Cary Elwes) explains, as long as Kass obeys the fine print and stays out of trouble, the fortune will be hers.
Mysterious trouble starts finding Kass, though, and it all points to Griffin having faked his death. Her sister is disowned in an email from Kass that she never drafted or sent. During a sexually-harassing job interview, Kass passes out, drugged by the very bottle of diazepam that knocked Griffin out weeks previous. Some odder phenomena—a sentient sheet, some disembodied breath, the film’s on-the-nose title—imply that the supposedly-dead master of optics has figured out a way to make himself invisible and, since he’s also a manipulative master of “optics,” gaslight Kass so that her loved ones don’t believe her when she starts screaming about abuses that nobody else has witnessed.
Though The Invisible Man is ostensibly packaged as a monster movie—a modernized, very Blumhouse-y update of a Universal vault classic—it far more closely resembles ‘90s domestic thrillers like Fear, Fatal Attraction, and Sleeping with the Enemy. It’s pretty a solid addition to the genre, though, benefiting from an overlay of science fiction and the occasional punctuation of gore. (Those makeup effects are infinitely more convincing than the inevitable, abysmal-looking, visible/invisible CGI.) Full credit is due to Whannell’s modestly improving direction, as well as Moss’s raw nerve performance, and the unfortunate topicality of the Me Too movement. (Not to mention getting to call out “gaslighting”; everyone loves doing that these days.)
Whannell relies less on his visceral Saw experience and more on his spooky Insidious work here, showing a sure hand with a camera that tends to drift into empty spaces, lingering on the palpable suspense of these creeping voids. Even when he wanders into some truly goofy shit—a wholesale lift from Die Another Day; a visual reference to the classic bandaged invisible man; a person muttering “come on…” while hacking a computer—his lead elevates the material above complete risibility.
Without the benefit of Verhoeven-budget effects, the Invisible Man cast can look quite silly fighting at nothing, but Moss approaches these scenes with appropriately nervous gravity—even making invisible guy tropes like hide-and-seek in the rain seem urgent and fresh. Her commitment lends credibility to this nonsense that just so happens to be steeped in contemporary sociopolitical themes. The plight of her Kass, dismissed as hysterical, is awfully familiar and, eventually, becomes an example of female empowerment in horror that even Jamie Lee Curtis could aspire to.
The Invisible Man could’ve been a disastrous, action-retrofitted monster movie remake like Universal’s tacit predecessor, The Mummy, but it doesn’t remotely have that kind of arbitrary bombast and franchising on its mind. The movie, like the Invisible Man himself, is cleverer than that. Aping the formula of some of history’s better horror outings—say, Dawn of the Dead, or Rosemary’s Baby—this is a genre exercise that gets the mechanics right in service of a greater social commentary. As almost laughably startling as its fake slit throats are, The Invisible Man reminds that the most effective terrors are real.
Grade: B–
The Invisible Man
Director: Leigh Whannell
Studio: Universal Pictures
Runtime: 124 minutes
Rating: R
Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Harriet Dyer, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Michael Dorman
