The Invisible Man
A horror-ific triumph
Review
The Invisible Man (R16, 124 mins) Directed by Leigh Whannell Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
Amodern day relaunch of a classic franchise can go very well, or diabolically badly. Of the middleground, we hear not much.
A few years ago, the captains and the kings at Universal Pictures decided to launch a Dark Universe
series of films, apparently labouring under the delusion that the yoof of today would flock to franchise names that mostly hadn’t troubled the world’s marquees since the 1930s.
The Mummy – the bloody awful 2017 one with Tom Cruise – was the first in the series, and The Bride of Frankenstein was slated to follow a year or two later. Then, it would be the turn of The Invisible Man to reintroduce himself to a 21st-century audience.
But, history has recorded that
The Mummy went down like a lead kereru¯ and the rest of the series was thrown on the backburner, quite probably for all time.
Until, that is, a very smart filmmaker with a proven track record for delivering exactly what an audience wants – even if they might not know it yet themselves – came along and expressed an interest.
Australian Leigh Whannell, with his writing and producing partner James Wan, was behind the fantastically successful Saw
franchise, a series I can forgive nearly everything, so much do I respect the first film in the sequence. After Saw, Whannell and Wan launched the Insidious series, of which Whannell directed the third instalment.
The Invisible Man is Whannell’s third shift in the director’s chair, but it is the film with which his film-making abilities – and his ability to tell a rip-roaring story – have come into full view.
This Invisible Man flips H G Wells’ classic tale on its head. This is not the story of a man who loses his sanity when he becomes invisible. It is rather the story of how that man’s intended victims manage to fight back, when the megalomaniacal transparent creep uses his new powers to stalk and harass his ex-partner.
And put like that, you’ll guess that the film quickly becomes an intense and occasionally extraordinarily well put together parable of abusive relationships in general and gaslighting – deliberately making someone doubt their own sanity – in particular.
In the lead – and very nearly every scene – Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale) is exceptional, toggling from abject terror to kickass fury and back, as she negotiates with her own senses and reason, at first convinced that her ‘‘dead’’ expartner is back and haunting her.
Framing Moss, some great production design, a chilling sound-bed and a flurry of very smart decisions around camera placement and movement all contribute to a movie that wrings every cent out of a modest budget and gets it up on the screen where it belongs.
I walked into The Invisible Man not expecting much more than ‘‘this week’s horror’’, albeit with a better-than-average cast.
I walked out wondering if this is a serious early contender for a Top 10 of 2020 list, in 10 short months’ time.