“I’m the Invisible Man – I’m the Invisible Man – Incredible how you can – See right through me!”
So, Johnny Depp was set to feature as the Invisible Man, as part of Universal’s proposed Dark Universe, but when Tom Cruise’s The Mummy tanked, the project was abandoned. I’d imagine Johnny Depp would have starred in a very different movie than the one we have here, because this invisible man is irredeemable and unmarketable. Instead, we have Elizabeth Moss running away from a terrifyingly salty ex-boyfriend.
Cecilia (Elizabeth Moss) escapes her controlling boyfriend’s home, and two weeks later, finds out that he has committed suicide. Her boyfriend, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) has left her some money, and as she makes a motion to collect it, she begins to be disturbed by an undistinguishable presence that she insists is Adrian, very much alive. Adrian worked in optics, and perhaps he has figured out a way to appear invisible somehow. Cecilia’s life spirals further and further downwards, as she struggles to convince her friend James (Aldis Hodge) and sister, Emily (Harriet Dyer) that she is being haunted by an invisible man. This film is directed by Leigh Whannell.
From the beginning, it was evident that the film was going to rely heavily on sound to evoke its scares. The Invisible Man is invisible, and therefore unseen, and silent. With that said, the movie opts to make everyday household items like dog bowls and mobile phone triple the decibels of normal to give the audience a jolt – I’ve always had a disgruntled relationship with movies using these technique to trip my sensitivities, where someone sneaking out of a house is made to seem so much more scarier than it is due to unnatural sounds and an ominous score. In fact, if it weren’t for the trailers and movie title, you could mistake this movie for being about an unstable woman making problems in her own head for the entire first act. Simply put, I wanted to see more invisible man, terrorising Cecilia, and at least making himself more obvious to us, the audience. The movie pans across living spaces quite frequently, to suggest there is a something else in the room, but I was expecting to notice something had moved or changed more often than I did. It wasn’t enough for me that a sense of ‘he could be anywhere’ was terrifying. This guy is invisible, and you have to think, there must be an infinite amount of ways to harass someone and stir them crazy, but this invisible man believes in short bursts of chaos, and leaving taps running in the kitchen sink. When the invisible man killed Emily, I was as startled as I was excited that finally our antagonist was on the attack. In fact, the few movie moments most memorable to me involved its carnage – I liked when the invisible man was walking along Cecilia’s bed sheet and when he began beating up the cops in the mental ward. I loved the way the movie depicts the invisible man fighting Cecilia, and throwing her around the house, even though I did get squirmy thinking that scene is basically a domestic assault where the perpetrator is unseen.
But I have to admit, I fucked up a little bit – I thought Cecilia stole from Adrian as she fled the house in the opening scene, which framed her as a partly guilty character for the rest of my viewing. I said to my friend when the movie was done, “and what about that bag she stole, we never heard about that again…”, and he was like, “that was just a bag with her clothes and escape essentials, wasn’t it?” … Yeah, I may have goofed. And it’s a big goof, because with theft on my mind, it softens the domestic violent allegory that this movie is surely presenting, leading me to be less sympathetic to Cecilia than I think I otherwise would have been. I certainly feel I would go along with Cecilia more easily a second time around, as I recontextualise the movie I saw in my mind. My initial focus was more on the titular character, the invisible man.
Still, I want to talk about the ending, and my thoughts as I left the cinema; the movie asks us to swallow a lot to be okay with our protagonist committing murder. I jumped back and forth while watching the movie, on whether it was a wise or poor decision to deprive us some time with Adrian before this caper took place, until the ending. If you look at what the movie presents us, on the one hand, Adrian is probably a bad guy because Cecilia said he was, and Adrian probably spent time as the invisible man because he used the word ‘surprise’ to finish a sentence, like the text Cecilia received in the attic. But we’ve also seen Adrian was sealed in his basement and claims his brother, who is killed in the suit, has always been the manipulative one. If the police have confirmed Adrian’s alibi, what do we have to believe Cecile on but a woman’s intuition? Just a scene or two at the beginning of the movie merely suggesting Adrian has a temper or ill-will towards Cecilia would have made this ending more digestible, and given real tension as to why she’s leaving the house in the opening scene. And I get that the movie might be going for ambiguity; if the movie is making a comment on domestic abuse, then most of the time domestic abuse goes unseen with the victim’s story the only proof you need. But the stakes here are murder, and involve Cecilia’s good-natured cop friend having to be okay with it too. I feel the movie could have been tighter, and made a sharper point of indicating how isolating or mistaken Cecilia’s friend were for not believing her (because they do have a point; I’d side with them in not believing in an invisible stalker too) – then when she murders Adrian, she could then shove it in James’s face that he also can’t prove her violence, and leave it off with Cecilia as an anti-hero.
Elizabeth Moss is good at going crazy in despair, and a large part of this movie works because of her competent believability. I appreciated the decision to show Cecilia is already suffering from deep anxiety to the point where she was afraid to leave the house before the invisible man makes the scene, because I feel like it added to the intended tension when she was feeling unsafe. I hated A Wrinkle in Time as much as the next person, but I don’t think that’s ever a reason for an invisible man to wack Sydney (Storm Reid) across the face. Sydney had just suggested they ignore if Cecilia was suffering a psychotic break by eating some cake… but no, still no reason to hit her. I do feel like I can nit-pick this movie to high heaven which is never a good sign, like why did James rush back to the house when he heard Adrian was after Sydney since he’d never believed Cecilia before? Wouldn’t a simple blood test reveal if Adrian had been tied up and sealed in his basement for a week or a few hours? How bad are the mental health workers that they inform Adrian’s brother that Cecilia can’t have a pen, but don’t check his briefcase for the spare three? When you take a step into a walk-in robe looking for someone, you don’t check the corners?
This movie earns an MA rating, dealing in scenes involving domestic abuse, suicidal attempts, assaulting a minor, rape and murder; pretty heavy stuff for what was originally a science-fiction based story. Although, through all that, I think I found my new answer to the question, “who would you turn gay for, for $1,000,000?” – Aldis Hodge; that is a man, right there!
2.0
Leave a Reply