The Invisible Man (2019 directed by Leigh Whannel) is an effectively scary horror film filtered through "#metoo" era feminism. The picture is a little too long and somewhat prosaic, but it's well-made and exciting. The stalked and abused heroine, Cecily, is played by Elisabeth Moss and she takes the role seriously, almost too seriously, I think, for what is, in effect, a garish popular entertainment -- when "pulp" takes itself to be high art, the results are, often, unfortunate. The Invisible Man teeters on this brink but doesn't slide over the edge.
The film's gothic aspect is pretty obvious from its opening: enormous savage-looking waves break against an isolated boulder under a foreboding cliff. The sea-spray from the waves forms into wobbly-looking white letters that spell out the film's title, words that, then, dissolve as well -- it's an effect worthy of a 1930's Universal horror film. The 21st century equivalent of a mad doctor's lair hangs on the very edge of the cliffs above the furious sea. It's been noted that when film makers want to establish the villainy of an antagonist in crime and horror films, the bad guy invariably lives in a stark modernist mansion: the first example of this is the Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced house on a rock where James Mason lurks in Hitchcock's North by Northwest. Since that film, many movie mad doctors and criminals have resided in brutishly modern concrete and steel cubes. In this movie, the villain (Adrian, a mad scientist specializing in optics) lives in a literally Brutalist haunted house -- the place is comprised of concrete modules with huge windows looking out over the barren sea coast, acres of empty rooms, and a cellar that seems full of scientific equipment as well as precision lathes and drill-presses and what appears to be a torture chamber. In this manse, Cecily is plotting her escape from her domineering boyfriend. She removes his sleeping hand from her flank, sneaks out of the house (surrounded by huge Mexican border-wall-style parapets) and darts through a dark woods, the bad guy apparently pursuing her. She's picked up by her sister, Emily on the road but not before the vicious Adrian slams his fist through a car window. The film begins with a "bang" and it's a loud one. It takes the film about a half hour to get to the motif of the invisible man.
Cecily hides with Emily's boyfriend, a hunky Black cop. She's clearly traumatized by the domestic abuse suffered at Adrian's hands. Then, she learns that Adrian has ostensibly committed suicide. Adrian's brother, a slimy lawyer-type, announces that the mad doctor has named her in his Will and, in fact, bequeathed five million dollars to her on the condition that she commit no crimes and remind of sound mind. But Adrian, wearing a 21st century equivalent of Siegfried's Tarnhelm, is not dead, but has become an invisible man. When he puts on his weird black suit (it's comprised of hundreds of bead-like video cameras in small sockets), he vanishes and can do whatever he likes. He stalks Cecily and, in an extended scene, besieges her in the Black cop's home. Cecily complains that she is being stalked by an invisible man -- but, of course, everyone believes she's insane. (And Elisabeth Moss' lurid performance -- she often seems to be channeling Anthony Perkins in Psycho -- doesn't add to the character's credibility.) Cecily meets her sister, Emily, at an annoyingly hip Asian fusion place. The invisible man is at the table too and he slashes Emily's throat. When poor Cecily picks up the murder weapon, she's accused (very plausibly) of the crime. She's put in a rubber room that she has to share, apparently, with the invisible man who continues to torment her. By this time, Cecily learns that she's pregnant with the invisible man's child. She decides to kill herself using a fountain pen with a razor sharp point, carelessly left out for her to snatch, when the bad guy's brother comes to remind her that if she wants the five million dollars she needs to carry the baby to term. There's a big fight with the invisible man in the rubber room and, ultimately, Cecily escapes. The invisible man kills a bunch of guards and, although wounded (Cece has perforated him a half-dozen times with the fountain pen's point) pursues her. There are more scary confrontations and, at last, the invisible man is gunned down. But this being a horror film based on the over-the-top paradigm of Brian de Palma's stylish, if often, incoherent films, killing the bad guy once is not enough and there's a coda that also ends badly for the villain. The film seems set up for a sequel. By the end of the movie, Cecily has become an avenging feminist fury and she, now, has the invisibility suit in her purse, ready to don, it seems, and revenge herself upon abusive men. There's a twist toward the end that the audience sees coming a mile away -- but it doesn't matter, the twist is designed to lead to more creepy mayhem and this is what we have paid to see.
The movie's special effects are all cheapened by CGI and they are not nearly as eerie and effective as the invisibility camera-tricks in the original version of H.G. Wells' novel made in 1933.. But the idea of being stalked by a genius billionaire invisible man is pretty scary and the movie exploits very long takes in which we are on-edge waiting for the bad guy to somehow manifest his presence. The idea that the invisibility suit is made of cameras (that is, that the bad-guy is "argus-eyed") is a weird metaphor that makes no sense technologically but is very resonant as a poetic metaphor. (The film exploits surveillance footage in many of its scenes.) The bad guy can't be seen but he sure as hell can see you, and his eyes are everywhere At one point, the bad guy even hides in the attic of the house where Cecelia lives. The original film posited that invisibility makes men mad -- in other words, when they can do anything they want, they go berserk. (This idea goes back to Plato, at least, and possibly Herodotus.-- the test of virtue is what you would do if you could do anything.) In the earlier film, the bad guy is driven mad by his power and, ultimately, plans to use invisibility to conquer the world -- and there are some showy speeches to this effect. The recent film reduces these ideas to sexual politics and, I think, trivializes the stakes --- however, there is certainly a powerful symbolic charge to the idea that no one will believe the heroine, that she gets accused of all kinds of crimes and misdeeds committed by the invisible man, and that a grave injustice is always about to occur to herself. (These aspects of the film will ring true to anyone who has ever been involved with, or closely observed, a nasty custody fight, for instance, in which the combatants try to frame one another with respect to all sorts of felonies and misdemeanors.) One shot reminds us of the original movie -- in a hospital, Cecelia sees a man all swathed in bandages. The Invisible Man is 1933 went about covered in gauze that he would, now and then, unravel to very dramatic effect.
The Invisible Man demonstrates that films can no longer be characterized as American or British or Italian, let us say. This film was shot in studios in Australia; the city sequences were shot in Toronto with helicopter and drone work suggesting that the movie takes place somewhere in San Francisco. Money from about ten different international production companies was used to finance the picture -- it earns tax credits in Germany and New South Wales, Australia.
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