A woman is stalked by her abusive – but allegedly deceased – ex-boyfriend in The Invisible Man, a gripping and expertly-directed new thriller that borrows the central concept, but little else, from the classic H.G. Wells novel from which it is named.
Elisabeth Moss stars as Cecilia Kass, who in the film’s opening and perhaps finest scene, stages a daring nighttime escape from her abusive boyfriend Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) after drugging him to sleep. Director Leigh Whannel cannily plays with silence here – interrupted by the kick of a dog’s bowl, or a car alarm – in the same way he’ll use open-space visuals later on in the film.
Weeks later, in suburban hiding with friend James (Aldis Hodge) and his daughter Sydney (Storm Reid), Cecilia learns that Adrian has killed himself. Still on edge, she has trouble believing he isn’t lurking around every corner – especially when some unexplained incidents begin to occur.
Now, there are a few possibilities here: Cecilia is actually going crazy, which most of the other characters in the film infer; she’s being haunted by Adrian’s ghost; she’s being gaslit by another character in the film; or Adrian really isn’t dead, as his brother Tom (Michael Dorman), insists, and has turned invisible to stalk Cecilia in plain sight.
But because the title of the film is The Invisible Man, Adrian is an “optics entreprenuer”, and we glimpse some kind of Hollow Man like device in the film’s very first scene as Cecilia makes her escape, we can reasonably infer which of the above scenarios is correct. The very first sequence of unusual activity also confirms these suspicions.
But because The Invisible Man never explicitly tells us what’s going on until climactic revelations, it allows us to further empathize with its protagonist and create additional levels of suspense. As Cecila stares into that empty space and intuits that her abusive ex is actually there, the situation is terrifying regardless of any true explanation.
And then – like many of these movies – the climax kicks in with its revelations and the The Invisible Man starts to unravel. The climactic turns have been engineered to insert some surprise in the proceedings rather than provide any rational conclusion to the story, and the more The Invisible Man explains itself to us, the less it makes sense.
The climactic developments in The Invisible Man are not enough to ruin the taut, well-crafted buildup that came before it, but do sour things a bit.
Director Leigh Whannell, who co-wrote the wildly successful Saw and Insidious franchises, previously made the seriously underrated Upgrade; despite some story flaws here, The Invisible Man cements his emergence as one of the best genre directors now working in Hollywood.
It’s incredible that Blumhouse, the studio behind this and other first-rate horror-thrillers like Get Out, can put out relevant and even Hitchcockian-level films like this alongside anachronistic junk like Fantasy Island within the span of a few weeks. The Invisible Man is a first-rate, almost Hitchockian exercise in generating suspense, and puts the studio’s other efforts to shame.
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