The Invisible Man (2020)
Rated R for some strong bloody violence, and language
Score: 5 out of 5
At last, Universal Pictures finally cracks the code on how to successfully reboot the classic monsters that made the studio's name back in the 1930s and '40s. The solution: just make good old-fashioned horror movies like they used to. A few modern special effects and themes, but keep the budget low, get talented filmmakers behind the camera and a good cast in front of it, and focus on the qualities that make for a good, crowd-pleasing horror movie: a suspenseful atmosphere punctuated by a few massive and memorable frights. As a bonus, use the basic conceit of the monster as a metaphor for issues facing people today, such that, even when they're out of the theater, they're still looking over their shoulder. Giant battles? Shared universes? Block-busting budgets? What do you need those for? It goes without saying that The Invisible Man is one of the best horror movies of the last five to ten years, a slam-dunk sci-fi chiller that takes the broadest strokes of the H. G. Wells novel and its 1933 film adaptation and effortlessly brings them into the modern day, playing the premise for pure paranoia. It is a movie that will keep you up at night looking over your shoulder, never sure whether or not something is watching you even if you can plainly see that there's nobody there, bundled within a harrowing tale that will likely hit even closer to home for anyone who's ever dealt with domestic abuse. And with the coronavirus causing Universal to make all of its new releases available on demand well ahead of schedule, it's the perfect opportunity to check out a film about a monster you can't see stalking the home you're quarantined in.
The protagonist Cecilia Kass is a young woman who has just escaped an abusive relationship with Adrian Griffin, a Silicon Valley tech mogul who made his fortune with revolutionary optics technology -- and was also a controlling, manipulative sociopath who mistreated and tried to dominate everybody around him, including Cecilia and his brother Tom. Staying with her friend James, a San Francisco police detective, and his daughter Sydney in order to avoid Adrian, Cecilia learns from her sister Emily that Adrian killed himself after she ran away. It seems like the nightmare of her relationship with Adrian is over... at least, until she starts to notice a mysterious presence in the house with her. Knowing Adrian's technical knowledge, Cecilia starts to suspect that he has faked his death and figured out a way to turn himself invisible in order to continue tormenting her. The only problem is getting people to believe such a science-fiction story without sounding like she's crazy -- and given the way she's been acting over it, that's a reasonable assumption to make.
Elisabeth Moss is the heart and soul of this film as Cecilia. We see very little of Adrian's actual abuse of her; outside the third act, the man himself, as opposed to the Invisible Man he becomes, is (pardon the pun) barely ever seen in the film, meaning that it comes down entirely to Moss' performance to convey what Cecilia has gone through. She does an outstanding job selling me on the idea that Cecilia has endured domestic and sexual abuse at Adrian's hands, simply from the moment where she describes what Adrian did to her (a rare case where violating the "show, don't tell" rule worked wonders) and from her jittery reactions to everything afterward. Even now that (she thinks) it's over, she has trouble moving on and bringing her life back to normal no matter how hard she tries, simply because her memory of what Adrian did to her continues to haunt her -- and all this before it becomes obvious that Adrian literally is still haunting her. Once that happens, Moss transitions into a woman who is seemingly going mad and losing her grasp on reality as Adrian sets out to destroy Cecilia's life and turn everybody around her against her. Even at the very end when she finally turns the tables on Adrian, it's clear that she's suffered permanent mental and emotional scars as a result of her experience, the implication being that she too may be heading down a very dark path. The metaphors aren't subtle; this is fundamentally a film about domestic abuse, one in which the abuser attempts to make his victim doubt her own reality such that she thinks that she's crazy and cannot trust anybody or anything other than him, to the point of even borrowing some plot turns from the classic 1944 thriller Gaslight, the film that invented the term "gaslighting" to describe this kind of abuse. I'm fortunate to have never endured anything like the kind of abuse that Cecilia goes through both before and during the events of this film, but going by other reactions I've seen, I'd imagine this one being a film that hits especially close to home for a lot of people.
The film itself was plenty scary enough for me, anyway, so I can't imagine how it might play for someone bringing that kind of baggage with them. Leigh Whannell has been one of my favorite horror screenwriters in Hollywood ever since he co-wrote Saw, and in 2018, his directorial debut Upgrade showed that his talents also applied in front of the camera -- and beyond just horror. This film is far and away on the other end of the spectrum from the scrappy, violent action flick that was Upgrade, but Whannell is no less at home here with a slow-burn story that, while it does eventually deliver the goods, chooses to take its time building an aura of dread around the fact that our invisible villain could be anywhere around the protagonist. The scares for much of the first act are old-school and light on blood; a recurring shot is to point the camera at an area of empty space to imply that Adrian could very well be hiding there in plain sight, and the early scenes where he does make his presence known come in the form of things like his footprints leaving an impression on the carpet, a knife getting knocked off the kitchen counter, or the barking of a dog. With the villain being invisible, Whannell had his work cut out for him crafting a convincing bad guy and representing him with what looks, for all intents and purposes, to be nothing but air, but he not only did it, he went the extra mile and made it feel as though Adrian could be lurking in any shot right in front of me. About halfway in, one of the film's best scares drove that home better than anything: there is no place where Cecilia or those around her are safe, not even a place where you'd think he couldn't sneak up on you. Needless to say, I found myself looking over my shoulder quite a bit when I got home. And when Whannell does go all-in with the big scares, he doesn't hold back, putting his action chops to good use the same way he did with what he learned from a career of working on horror movies. Scenes where Adrian is attacking Cecilia and others could have easily looked ridiculous, like actors flailing about at the air, but instead, Whannell makes Adrian a firm, grounded, and extremely physical presence in all of them with how he demolishes anybody who stands in his way. A climatic fight with a bunch of security guards in a hospital hallway stands as one of the best action-horror scenes I've seen in a long time.
The protagonist Cecilia Kass is a young woman who has just escaped an abusive relationship with Adrian Griffin, a Silicon Valley tech mogul who made his fortune with revolutionary optics technology -- and was also a controlling, manipulative sociopath who mistreated and tried to dominate everybody around him, including Cecilia and his brother Tom. Staying with her friend James, a San Francisco police detective, and his daughter Sydney in order to avoid Adrian, Cecilia learns from her sister Emily that Adrian killed himself after she ran away. It seems like the nightmare of her relationship with Adrian is over... at least, until she starts to notice a mysterious presence in the house with her. Knowing Adrian's technical knowledge, Cecilia starts to suspect that he has faked his death and figured out a way to turn himself invisible in order to continue tormenting her. The only problem is getting people to believe such a science-fiction story without sounding like she's crazy -- and given the way she's been acting over it, that's a reasonable assumption to make.
Elisabeth Moss is the heart and soul of this film as Cecilia. We see very little of Adrian's actual abuse of her; outside the third act, the man himself, as opposed to the Invisible Man he becomes, is (pardon the pun) barely ever seen in the film, meaning that it comes down entirely to Moss' performance to convey what Cecilia has gone through. She does an outstanding job selling me on the idea that Cecilia has endured domestic and sexual abuse at Adrian's hands, simply from the moment where she describes what Adrian did to her (a rare case where violating the "show, don't tell" rule worked wonders) and from her jittery reactions to everything afterward. Even now that (she thinks) it's over, she has trouble moving on and bringing her life back to normal no matter how hard she tries, simply because her memory of what Adrian did to her continues to haunt her -- and all this before it becomes obvious that Adrian literally is still haunting her. Once that happens, Moss transitions into a woman who is seemingly going mad and losing her grasp on reality as Adrian sets out to destroy Cecilia's life and turn everybody around her against her. Even at the very end when she finally turns the tables on Adrian, it's clear that she's suffered permanent mental and emotional scars as a result of her experience, the implication being that she too may be heading down a very dark path. The metaphors aren't subtle; this is fundamentally a film about domestic abuse, one in which the abuser attempts to make his victim doubt her own reality such that she thinks that she's crazy and cannot trust anybody or anything other than him, to the point of even borrowing some plot turns from the classic 1944 thriller Gaslight, the film that invented the term "gaslighting" to describe this kind of abuse. I'm fortunate to have never endured anything like the kind of abuse that Cecilia goes through both before and during the events of this film, but going by other reactions I've seen, I'd imagine this one being a film that hits especially close to home for a lot of people.
The film itself was plenty scary enough for me, anyway, so I can't imagine how it might play for someone bringing that kind of baggage with them. Leigh Whannell has been one of my favorite horror screenwriters in Hollywood ever since he co-wrote Saw, and in 2018, his directorial debut Upgrade showed that his talents also applied in front of the camera -- and beyond just horror. This film is far and away on the other end of the spectrum from the scrappy, violent action flick that was Upgrade, but Whannell is no less at home here with a slow-burn story that, while it does eventually deliver the goods, chooses to take its time building an aura of dread around the fact that our invisible villain could be anywhere around the protagonist. The scares for much of the first act are old-school and light on blood; a recurring shot is to point the camera at an area of empty space to imply that Adrian could very well be hiding there in plain sight, and the early scenes where he does make his presence known come in the form of things like his footprints leaving an impression on the carpet, a knife getting knocked off the kitchen counter, or the barking of a dog. With the villain being invisible, Whannell had his work cut out for him crafting a convincing bad guy and representing him with what looks, for all intents and purposes, to be nothing but air, but he not only did it, he went the extra mile and made it feel as though Adrian could be lurking in any shot right in front of me. About halfway in, one of the film's best scares drove that home better than anything: there is no place where Cecilia or those around her are safe, not even a place where you'd think he couldn't sneak up on you. Needless to say, I found myself looking over my shoulder quite a bit when I got home. And when Whannell does go all-in with the big scares, he doesn't hold back, putting his action chops to good use the same way he did with what he learned from a career of working on horror movies. Scenes where Adrian is attacking Cecilia and others could have easily looked ridiculous, like actors flailing about at the air, but instead, Whannell makes Adrian a firm, grounded, and extremely physical presence in all of them with how he demolishes anybody who stands in his way. A climatic fight with a bunch of security guards in a hospital hallway stands as one of the best action-horror scenes I've seen in a long time.
The Bottom Line
A rewatch with my dad last week confirmed that this was one of the best recent horror movies I've seen in a while. It's an exceptionally tight thriller with a bravura lead performance by Moss, a director at the top of his game, and scares that hit hard on first viewing and dig their claws even deeper the more you think about the metaphors behind them.
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