Review: The Invisible Man (2020)

Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man is about as scary, melodramatic, and entertaining as you could hope for an updated and revamped version of H.G. Wells’ classic novel to be. It’s not really an adaptation—only the central concept of a scientist who turns himself invisible in order to wreak havoc is similar to the source material—but more of a remix. Here, the invisible man is not simply a criminal and nefarious villain but an abusive boyfriend who uses his new powers to drive his girlfriend, Cecilia, played masterfully by Elisabeth Moss, to the edge of madness. If such a concept sounds shallow and exploitative, perhaps look elsewhere, but if you’re intrigued by a film that combines the feminist paranoia of Rosemary’s Baby with the negative space scares of the Paranormal Activity series, The Invisible Man is for you.

The film begins in a cliffside mansion, overlooking the ink black waves of the West Coast, where Cecilia plots her escape from her boyfriend, Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a wealthy tech entrepreneur. We watch Cecilia move silently throughout the modernist house and observe every painstaking detail of her plan, beginning with drugging Adrian with Diazepam to disarming the security system to turning the hallway security camera to face the bed so she can watch Adrian sleeping on her phone.

A good film opening instructs you on how to approach the rest of the film, which is the case with The Invisible Man. Visually, the opening emphasizes negative space and geography. Cecilia moves throughout most of the house, which gives us an understanding of its geography, so we can imagine what is happening in the rooms we are not currently seeing, creating suspense. Whannell also uses the frame to either linger on negative space behind Cecilia or to isolate her in a large frame. These approaches in framing either make us assume something hidden is sharing the frame with Cecilia or make Cecilia small and insignificant on screen, both of which create the tension necessary to scare the viewer. 

At the end of the opening Cecilia escapes and eventually recuperates in the San Francisco home of her childhood friend, James (Aldis Hodge), a cop who lives with his teenage daughter, Sydney (Storm Reid). She learns that Adrian apparently killed himself and left her $5 million, but soon enough, she starts to have bizarre experiences when she’s left alone. She becomes convinced that Adrian, who was a pioneer in optics technology, didn’t kill himself and instead made himself invisible in order to torture her. And as the title of the film makes clear, she is absolutely correct.

Throughout the rest of the film, Whannell varies and escalates the visual approach found in the opening. Sometimes the scare is simple: a blanket being slowly pulled off a sleeping Cecilia, or a slight indentation in a chair, which makes it look like something is occupying it. In both cases, the approach is subtle enough for Cecilia to question herself and others, including James as well as Cecilia’s estranged sister, Emily (Harriet Dyer), to think she’s losing it. Other times, the approach is far more visceral. For instance, Cecilia goes about cooking breakfast and as she turns her back to the stove, the burner is turned up to full, causing the bacon to catch fire. Later, she gets into an argument with James and Sydney and as she grows increasingly hysterical and gets closer to Sydney, something slaps Sydney in the face, making it seem as if Cecilia did so.

Like all good horror films, The Invisible Man mostly plays off negative space and tension. Its best sequence finds Cecilia at home alone after driving James and Sydney away with her hysterics. Convinced that Adrian is invisible and tormenting her, Cecilia searches every space in the home, including the dark, dusty attic, in order to find evidence of his presence. The scenario is obviously inspired by the standout scene in Paranormal Activity where the characters follow a trail of dusty footprints into the attic only to find a mangled photograph of themselves among the cobwebs. However, Whannell takes a formal cue from one of that film’s sequels, Paranormal Activity 3, in using slow pans to ratchet up the tension in the negative space on screen. Each time Cecilia enters a new room, he pans the camera to follow her, but always on a delay, which forces us to linger on the hallway or room she just exited and the empty space left behind.

The approach is certainly not reinventing the wheel, but it’s masterfully done, taking full advantage of the eerie potential in an empty frame and the tension of knowing an invisible intruder is lingering somewhere out of view. There’s also a perverse genius to the escalating torture that Cecilia endures here, as it plays off her obviously tenuous mental state and the rational ways others would react to her claims. As I said earlier, certain viewers may not enjoy watching Cecilia endure such torment, thinking that such an approach exploits domestic abuse. In this respect, The Invisible Man is very much a generic horror film as it exploits violence and abuse and the terrors that people endure in real life in order to craft fictional entertainment. Each viewer can determine whether they can stomach such an approach, but it’s clear that such an approach is not unique to this film; all horror movies approach suffering in a similar way.

Furthermore, The Invisible Man has a feminist aspect that plays into a long line of feminist themes in horror cinema, most notably in films like the aforementioned Rosemary’s Baby, Cat People (1942), and, especially, Gaslight (1944), which gave us the term “gaslighting.” In fact, The Invisible Man is perhaps even more explicit in its feminist messaging than the above films, as its plot doesn’t merely play as a metaphor for the female experience, but deals explicity with domestic abuse and gaslighting classified as such within the world of the film. Thus, Cecilia’s suffering is not merely a stand-in for real trauma, but instead simply a melodramatic amplification of what real people experience in toxic relationships.

This approach would come across hamfisted were it not for Elisabeth Moss, who leverages every ounce of her considerable acting ability in the film. She’s in nearly every shot and has to convey the full spectrum of emotions, often within individual scenes. She also brings with her a credibility that helps sell the melodramatic material, as she’s become one of the actors best known for feminist storytelling on the small screen, most notably in The Handmaid’s Tale. Without Moss, The Invisible Man would not only suffer, it wouldn’t work at all. Luckily it does and easily proves to be one of the best products yet released under the Blumhouse banner. It’s perfect viewing for a good scare during an upcoming self-isolation movie night.

8 out of 10

The Invisible Man (2020, USA/Australia)

Directed by Leigh Whannell; written by Leigh Whannell, based on the novel by H.G. Wells; starring Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Harriet Dyer, Michael Dorman, Oliver Jackson-Cohen.

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