One of the enduring challenges facing horror movies is finding things that really scare an audience. Most horror movies fail at this, or abstract it in a way that an audience can sidestep their fears and take them out for a walk without any risk. A horror movie that can lay those fears bare and weaponize them against an audience is a rare thing and is likely to alienate a mass audience. The things that scare people are so personal that it's hard to find something that will reliably scare a large audience. Better to offer a thrill ride. I say all of this because the new version of The Invisible Man (2020, directed by Leigh Whannell), is legitimately scary and not in a fun, thrill-ride sort of way. It finds a raw nerve and it exploits it without mercy. What this film plays as a fantasy is all too real for so, so many women who are the victims of abuse. The varieties of abuse are all there on the screen: physical, mental, financial, institutional; the whole of a society geared to dismiss the suffering of women comes under scrutiny of this film's clinical examination. It's like a slap in the face.
The story follows Cecilia Kass, the wife of a tech millionaire, Adrian, who is in the process of escaping him as the film opens. She disables the security in the house where she lives and attempts to slip out in the wee hours of the morning. Unfortunately, she wakes him as she makes her escape and he chases her. She barely makes her getaway with her sister. Two weeks later, in hiding, she suffers from agoraphobia. She's convinced that Adrian will find her. She can barely step outside the house of the cop who is putting her up. Her sister brings her word that Adrian has killed himself and that she stands to inherit a fortune provided she stays out of trouble. Cecilia is deeply skeptical. Soon, strange things begin to happen around the house. She becomes convinced that Adrian has somehow figured out a technology that makes him invisible. Soon, her life starts to come apart, and no one believes her that it's Adrian's doing. Her misfortune culminates in the murder of her sister, for which Cecilia is held responsible. Worse still: she's pregnant. Adrian's lawyer, his brother, offers her a choice: all of her troubles will go away if she has the baby and returns to him. For Cecilia, that's a fate worse than death...
I've been reading a bunch of crime fiction from the 1940s written by women lately. Writers like Dorothy B. Hughes, Vera Caspary, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, whose work is the literary bedrock of the domestic version of film noir that flourished in that era. Do you know the films? Women's pictures where the threat comes from someone the heroine loves or something that the heroine does to protect herself? There are enough of these kinds of films that they form a distinctive genre unto themselves, within and adjacent to the mainstream of film noir. These are movies like Laura, The Reckless Moment, Don't Bother to Knock, and (particularly) Gaslight. I wasn't too far into The Invisible Man when I realized that I was watching a contemporary variant of the domestic noir. The elements of the form litter the film: the gaslighting husband, the woman escaping an abusive spouse, the challenge of staying out of jail or an asylum, the challenge of convincing authority figures that our heroine is not actually insane. This film does all of that. This film also reminds me a bit of The Entity, a 1982 film in which a woman is abused (including sexually) by an unseen force and who is not believed by authority figures and psychiatrists. What all of these stories have in common is a generalized fear of men that for many women is entirely justified. This is the core that makes The Invisible Man particularly scary. It's not that Adrian Griffin is exceptional because he's invisible and behaves the way he does because his invisibility (or his wealth) gives him impunity, it's because he is entirely commonplace. This is a story, sci fi trappings aside, that is all too familiar.
On top of its more traditional elements, The Invisible Man adds a layer of techno-thriller dystopia. Cecilia is trapped as much in a surveillance nightmare as she is in an abusive marriage. One of the first things she does as she escapes is avert the eyes of a camera. Later in the film her invisible nemesis demonstrates how thoroughly he has her under his watchful eye. Cameras are a weapon in this film, and turn out to be an element of Adrian's invisibility technology. His invisibility suit is covered with lenses, like he wants to become some technological version of Argus from Greek myth. There's something distinctly alien about his appearance when you can see him. It's a genuinely unsettling design. Adrian himself is the exact kind of villain who haunts many contemporary day-after-tomorrow dystopias. He's a tech millionaire, one described by Cecilia as a narcissistic sociopath, and I can't really say if the film limits that description to its particular monster given the political moment in which the film arrives, or to some more general social critique. I like to think it's the latter.
The film sets all of this in a world that is downright mundane. When I describe this as a domestic thriller, understand that most of this film's scariest scenes are set in a middle-class house that seems lived in by real people. The things that it sets in motion to discomfort the audience are utterly banal: a pan that catches fire, a set of bed covers that slide off of the people sleeping in the bed, a misplaced kitchen knife. This understands the Steven Spielberg/Stephen King formulation of horror of the ordinary, in which the familiar becomes strange. It contrast this against the unfamiliar. Adrian's house is drastically different from the house of Cecilia's cop friend, James. It's a concrete and hardwood art object that doesn't seem so much a home as it does a spread in an architectural digest. It's a rich person's space, one that contrasts with a middle-class space in such a way as to suggest a drastic difference between the haves and have-nots. It's of a piece with a Bond-villain's secret base, or the lair of a mad scientist on the eve of the Singularity. It suggests the horror in the Bauhaus of The Black Cat from 1934 and the abodes of other more contemporary mad scientists in films like Ex Machina or Upgrade. The film splits the difference with it's scenes at the mental hospital, which is an ordinary hospital space embellished with locks and guards, but which calls to mind echoes of Bedlam and the Gothic image of the madhouse.
This is a remake in name only. This bears only a cursory resemblance to H. G. Wells's novel and even less resemblance to the 1933 film or any other film about the character. Gone is the tragic hero/villain of the Gothic imagination, the scientist who meddled in things man was not meant to know, the man desperate to find a cure for the affliction he has visited on himself. The drug metaphor is gone. The film is not centered on Griffin himself (though it gives Adrian that last name as a nod to its provenance). This is not a film where the horror is internalized by its central character. This is a film where the horror is visited on an innocent, like an act of an angry god. This is a film in which the monster really is a monster. As I mentioned, I think it's significant that Adrian is one of the contemporary world's masters of the universe. He's as much a symbol of the institutional hubris and cupidity of wealthy white men as he is the bete noir of women's domestic predators, and the film draws a parallel between them. This is a film in which patriarchy itself is the monster, which it makes explicit when Adrian asserts ownership of Cecilia's unborn child and of Cecilia herself. He expresses himself in terms of patriarchal monsters in the throes of a tantrum when thwarted. "Look what you made me do!" when refusing to take responsibility for his own crimes. He's singularly unsympathetic. So too is his brother, the lawyer, who symbolizes the legal protections such men often employ. He's a monster, too, and Cecilia is absolutely correct when she tells him that he's the "jellyfish version" of Adrian, the abuser without a spine of his own.
The film chooses instead to center on the monster's victim, who in turn becomes the monster hunter. This is a familiar arc from fantasy and suspense stories without number. Cecilia is a character who begins without power and must find it within herself in order to survive, who has the people who might help her stripped away one by one until there is only her. There's an essential narrative hook to this archetype, but it depends on the central character being wholly sympathetic. We get that here, thanks to Elisabeth Moss's performance as the character. The film takes advantage of Moss's screen image as one of the twitchiest actresses of her era and her association with The Handmaid's Tale, but the character isn't something she's played before. She plumbs extreme emotions in this film. When she emerges at the end, ready to meet the monster in his lair, she is all together different from the woman at the beginning of the film. Her experience throughout is a crucible. It hardens her. Notably, when she finally confronts Adrian face to face, she's a picture of sexual confidence. She's dressed to the nines in a little black dress, confronting him with a weaponized femininity. It's thrilling to watch, and cathartic too. While the other actors are mostly good enough, Moss is on screen--often in painful close-up--for the entire film, and she's more than up to carrying the weight of its story to its bitter end.
The Invisible Man represents a quantum leap in the artistic growth of its director. I liked Leigh Whannell's last film, Upgrade, a lot, and this one might take place in the same world. But where that film was steeped in pulp filmmaking, this one is more elegant. It's worlds apart from Whannell's roots in the Saw and Insidious franchises. Where those films were blunt instruments, this one is a razor blade. Whannell uses the empty spaces within the film frame to create an oppressive aura of menace throughout the film, such that the audience engages with the frame in a way that they might otherwise tune out. This bears a favorable comparison to the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who pioneered this kind of menace through shot composition two decades ago. Which isn't to say that this is an art horror film. It knows the value of a set piece. Adrian's rampage in the mental hospital is a fine piece of mayhem--a horror audience that wants carnage will not go home disappointed. It's made playful by the single word he says during the entire thing. The Invisible Man in this film, unlike his predecessor in the 1933 film, is downright laconic. When he speaks--usually single words--it's grotesquely witty. Whannell circles back to this at the end, too, in a beautifully executed ending (if you'll pardon the pun), which he punctuates with one of Adrian's earlier utterances.
Whannell is fortunate, too, in so far as Universal has apparently abandoned their plans for a shared "Dark Universe" on the Marvel model, because this film is unburdened by franchise building. It's a lean film that eschews a franchise movie's scale and eye-drugging special effects. The special effects in this movie are excellent, but deployed with a purpose and in a way that doesn't call undue attention to themselves. The ways this contrives to make the invisible man visible are entirely plot driven, and the effects that bring this to light are grace notes rather than the object of the film itself. It's all in the service of a character-driven story that is intimate in scale, and thus able to focus on specific pressure points that make the audience squirm in ways that an epic could never do. In the bargain, Universal has bought, for a budget of $7 million something they couldn't manufacture for $170 million: one of the best horror movies they've ever made, one that can join the company of the studio's formidable horror legacy unashamed.
Speaking of Universal's legacy, someone in their marketing department has a fine sense of their history. Compare the 1933 preview poster with the main poster for the current film.
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