Film Review: THE INVISIBLE MAN (2020): The Psychological Is Made Manifest In Elisabeth Moss-Led Stalker Tech-Horror

The Invisible Man Review

The Invisible Man (2020), a film by Leigh Whannell, and starring Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Harriet Dyer, Michael Dorman, Benedict Hardie, Renee Lim, Brian Meegan, Vivienne Greer, Nicholas Hope, Cleave Williams, and Sam Smith.

The best new products don’t simply build on the models that came before them. They re-tool and improve the past designs to make things more elegant, more sleek, and more worthy of our consideration in the modern era. Excess without purpose is just pointless clutter. If you’re selling us the same thing once again, then you better give us a worthwhile reason to purchase it.

Enter Leigh Whannell’s remake of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man: borne out of the failed rekindling of a bloated Universal Monsters franchise, but trimmed down to the nail-biting scares you crave with enough thematic power on the back-end to keep your mind stirring for days. And what’s more: it’s both prescient and timeless!

After barely escaping her abusive tech developer boyfriend Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) intact, Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) seeks refuge at the home of James (Aldis Hodge), an old friend, and attempts to regain her sense of independence. But this proves challenging, as she is fearful of what sort of manipulation Adrian could still pull. However, two weeks later, through a passive-aggressive address from his lawyer brother Tom (Michael Dorman), Cecilia learns that Adrian has died by apparent suicide and she is left with a considerable chunk of his wealth.

Cecilia figures that she can finally start making a new life for herself and starts to moving forward – including paying it forward, literally, to James’ daughter Sydney (Storm Reid) to help her afford a college education. But Cecilia’s confidence in her safety starts to dwindle as odd instances keep occurring around her, and she can never shake the feeling that someone is watching her. When these instances start putting her in harm’s way she becomes certain that Adrian can’t actually be dead, and is continuing to manipulate her from beyond the pale. But unfortunately James, Sydney, and her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer) think she’s just being hysterical while letting her worries get the best of her. It becomes a fight for Cecilia’s own sanity as well as her own survival as she dodges these unseen apparitions, all the while struggling to find out the true extent of her ex’s technical work.

A possible detractor of The Invisible Man could be how obvious it makes its thesis from the get-go. The opening sequence starkly affirms just as much, with Cecilia’s razor-thin escape from Adrian’s mansion clearly showcasing the skeleton of gaslighting and manipulation that upholds this upcoming allegory. For most provocateurs of the art-house persuasion this basic acknowledgment of theme would suffice – less time to dwell on the thematic nitty-gritty, more time to revel in the nihilistic suffering (looking at you, Haneke) – and those of us whose viewing habits have been too saturated by said auteur visions might feel tempted to simply tune out at this point.

Thankfully, with Whannell being the talented genre craftsman that he is, he refuses to ease up that quickly. Not that Whannell draws out Cecilia’s trauma or ignores it entirely, but rather that he refuses to frame it solely as maudlin torture porn. (In fact, as a side note, when violence is shown it’s usually in short sudden bursts that are over just as soon as they start, gobsmacking you with genuine shock as you wait for your senses to catch up.)

The best horror is when the psychological is made manifest, and Whannell definitely leans into that tendency. But what’s more impressive is how he also subverts that concept via less-direct metaphors. When Cecilia’s allies sing such mantras like “He’s only as real as you make him” as patronizing attempts at rationality, it makes it harder for her to discern her actual reality from her perceived worries. The horror manifests itself from Cecilia’s past trauma, fueling the fear that her dead-but-possibly-not-dead ex is coming back to haunt her, but it also stems from a blanketed society-wide ignorance of women’s lived experiences. Cecilia’s current experiences are discarded simply as emotional ripples from bygone violence and she is left to fend for herself. It’s not just the fear of violence, but the fear of not being believed.

And Whannell doesn’t ease up there. He continues twisting the knife into the wound, excavating just how deep manipulation and abuse can go. As Cecilia digs deeper into Adrian’s past she uncovers the vast amount of control he exhibited over everyone in his life – particularly through his lawyer brother Tom, as well as Adrian’s own tampering with the public narrative surrounding him. With all those discoveries, and the specter of Adrian moving closer to a fatal blow, Cecilia’s chances of a clean escape become all the more slimmer.

It’s also worthy to note, between this and 2018’s terrific genre actioner Upgrade, that Whannell seems to have a particular disdain for the modern tech industry. Calling him “technophobic” might be a bit of a stretch, as his films’ horror don’t stem from a conservative fear of the new (even Upgrade’s Grey, though reluctant, is initially thrilled at STEM’s ability to alleviate the hardships of his disability). Rather, they come about in the face of the unchecked neoliberal assumptions that rampant innovation is inherently a net-positive, which creates a breeding ground for the destructive duo of exorbitant power and hyper-narcissism as a result. In The Invisible Man, Adrian’s manipulative tendencies are magnified by his technical prowess and monetary holdings, allowing him to carry out physical, emotional, and economic abuses against Cecilia and others while still earning reverence by everyone outside of his close circles. Adrian is but a stand-in for the industry at-large; it’s not his optical and surveillance technologies that are scary, but rather who will ultimately use them, how so, and why.

And none of this even touches on The Invisible Man’s visual flourishes.

Whannell knows that we know what we expect when watching horror films – particularly, how we’re always watching the empty space on the screen for something to rear its ugly head. And with a film with “Invisible” in the title, he knows we’ll be watching those spaces all the more intently, waiting for the smallest sign of disruption. But Whannell decides to mess with us by not putting anything in those spaces, and with the help of Duscio’s wide shots and slow, delicate pans, he instead surrounds the subject with insignificant details, empty space, and a whole lot of dread. It’s another subversion that’s as playful as it is anxiety-inducing – agoraphobic horror rather than claustrophobic – and we can now longer trust our cinematic instincts. At least there’s some playful inflections of body rigs and whacky tilts that startle us out of that trance, defibrillating a heartbeat back into our chests.

In conclusion, The Invisible Man is an astute retooling of a classic suspense story for the modern day, complete with evergreen waxing on misogynist gaslighting and tech-bro sycophancy. Whannell packs in a lot of complex dissertations on the functionality of horror, giving you a surprising amount of power in a sleek and elegant redesign of the classic Wellsian package.

This is one…ahem…”upgrade” you won’t wanna miss!

Rating: 8/10

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