Clever update of classic horror
Afew weeks back, picking over the smoking crater that had been 2020 and trying to remember what I’d seen on a big screen that had actually been any good, I remembered aMarch preview screening I’d been to for a reboot of The Invisible Man.
I walked in, expecting not much, knowing that modern day reboots of classic horror franchises are usually a one-way ticket to mediocrity at best.
I reckon it takes the luck of the devil to make any film great. So trying to achieve the near impossible twice with the same plot and title is pretty much a guaranteed failure.
And no, statistics wasn’tmy strongest subject at Waikato University back in the day.
But, once in awhile, maybe by cleverly updating an old formula, lightning can strike twice.
The Invisible Man (on Neon now) takes HG Wells’ story of the mad scientist trying to keep his invisibility a secret while still profiting by it and then completely inverts the usual movie adaptation by making that title character into a total so-and-so with sociopathic tendencies, while his ex-wife tries desperately to convince anyone who will listen that she is not the mad one and that she really is being taunted and terrorised by aman everyone else believes is dead. Phew.
As that woman, Elizabeth Moss brings a tonne of The Handmaid’s Tale credibility to her role, while never letting us doubt for a second that she will triumph in this fairly gritty fable of gaslighting taken to its absolute extremes.
In the title role, Oliver Jackson-Cohen ( Dracula) is suitably narcissistic and superficial. The Invisible Man is not the modern horror classic some people claimed, but it was a smart reclamation of the property that, surprisingly, was closer to Wells’ original unsympathetic characterisation than most modern movies had ever stayed.
And on Netflix, anyone still pining for a third season of Fleabag (never gonna happen, sadly) can still hunt out the show that launched Phoebe Waller-Bridge onto our screens.
Crashing is a dark comedy about a group of teens and 20s living in an
abandoned hospital in London. The tone shifts disarmingly between the heartfelt and truly poignant stuff of teenage life in general and near-homeless teenage life in a big city in particular, with the utterly deranged, filthy-minded and unfiltered lunacy that we immediately recognised and loved in Fleabag.
To watch Crashing is to watch a very great writer trying out sketches for ideas that will pretty soon be fully fledged creations.
It’s a shame there was only ever one season, but Waller-Bridge clearly knew she had other places to be.