THIS MONTH: THE INVISIBLE MAN
1 CECILIA’S ESCAPE
Chris Hewitt: Now this is how you start in medias res. Not with a bang, but a whisper, the suspense ratcheting up to unbearable levels as Elisabeth Moss’ Cecilia makes her meticulously planned escape, in the middle of the night, from her abusive partner, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-cohen). Soundtracked just by the crashing of nearby waves (and the occasional whirring of cameras to suggest the presence of one of Griffin’s fancy-dan invisible suits), this wordless sequence, tight with tension, tells us everything we need to know about Cecilia’s situation. And without even properly introducing us to Griffin, who is asleep the entire time, it renders us terrified of the threat he holds.
Leigh Whannell: I wanted to keep the character of Adrian mysterious. One of my initial thoughts was that to make the Invisible Man scary, I had to make him unknowable — rather than make him a central character, make him a background player. I didn’t want to know much about him. The less you know, the scarier he is.
John Nugent: Somehow, this opening scene is terrifying, despite the Invisible Man being fully visible. This is as tense and uncomfortable as any horror or thriller in recent memory, yet the bad guy spends most of the sequence sleeping quietly in his comfortable bed, drugged up to the nines by Cecilia’s sleeping-pill cocktail. It’s a masterclass in visual storytelling from Whannell and subtle use of body language from Moss, immediately conveying the possibility of immense danger beyond the apparently calm setting. There’s nothing supernatural about that threat, and at this point, nothing even invisible. It’s real, urgent, and as the encounter in the car shows, at absolute boiling point. Guaranteed sweaty palms from minute one.
2 DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
John Nugent: As far as Friday night movies go, domestic violence is not a subject most filmmakers like to venture into. But horror has always been a useful way to process real-life wrongs, and domestic abuse is as prevalent as they come — one in four women will experience it in their lifetime. Whannell clearly did his homework beforehand, interviewing domestic violence counsellors and experts for their
perspectives, and spending several hours poring over the script with Elisabeth Moss. The result is something that feels horrifically true-to-life, and far more powerful than anything supernatural. And the invisibility premise is an inspired way of tackling gaslighting, the form of psychological warfare in which someone is forced to question their sanity. After all, what could be more sanity-doubting than a threat nobody else can see?
3 THE UPGRADE REFERENCE
Adrian’s tech company is called
John Nugent: Cobalt — the same company as that run by tech guru Eron Keen (played by Harrison Gilbertson, above) which produces the computer chip ‘Stem’ in Whannell’s previous sci-fi chiller, Upgrade. Is this a sneaky Upgrade prequel?!
4 ADRIAN’S BROTHER
John Nugent: If Adrian Griffin is transparent, his brother Tom (Michael Dorman) is — figuratively speaking — kind of translucent. He’s a mystery, almost until the very end: a figure you can never quite trust, given his proximity to the bad guy, but one you suspect may be as much abused as abuser. Whannell has great fun playing with that ambiguity; the reveal in the hospital that he’s been conspiring with Adrian all along may not come as a huge surprise, but his appearance in the invisible suit certainly does. Yet there’s never the sense that he is, as Adrian claims, the true evil mastermind. He’s absolutely complicit in the crimes. But there may be a grain of truth, however manipulatively it’s delivered, in his claim to Cecilia that he’s a victim, too.
Chris Hewitt: We only get to meet Tom, Adrian Griffin’s younger sibling, four times in the course of The Invisible Man, but each time the audience’s
relationship with him changes immeasurably. The first time, when he tells Cecilia and Emily about the particulars of Adrian’s will, Kiwi actor Tom Dorman is so obviously off-key that we suspect that something’s up. “The brother’s in on it!” we cry (internally, so as not to disturb fellow cinemagoers). The second time he’s a little more sympathetic, revealing to Cecilia that he, too, suffered mental torment at the hands of Adrian. Could he be telling the truth? This leaves us off-balance for the third occasion, when he visits Cecilia in the psychiatric hospital. Might he be a valiant saviour, here to rescue her from her plight? No, instead he reveals himself as his brother’s partner-in-crime, and is even more odious and sleazy than before. So by the time he shows up again, and Cecilia puts a bunch of bullets in his chest as he tries to kill James and Sydney, we’re glad to see the back of the little prick. And don’t call it murder. More like ‘Invisible Manslaughter’.
5 THE FIGHT IN THE KITCHEN
Ian Freer: There is something a little bit opening-of-back-to-the-future about the way Whannell has the confidence to patiently plant seeds in the knowledge they will flourish later. When Cecilia puts on a frying pan, walks out and returns to find the pan on fire, she thinks little of it. But this is just a tiny prelude to a brutal scene where the threat from Adrian becomes tangible, if not visible. Like a scene from a paranormal thriller, Cecilia is lifted up from the throat and chucked up around her kitchen by an invisible entity. The scene was saved until the end of the schedule so Elisabeth Moss and the team
had time to work out the complex choreography. The result is brutal and brilliant.
6 THE ATTIC
Chris Hewitt: The clue is in the title. The Invisible Man. Griffin is not a ghost, or a spectral presence, who can haunt Cecilia 24/7. He’s a man. One wearing an admittedly fancy suit, but a man nonetheless. Which means that he needs to take breaks to eat, to go to the loo (we’ll figure out the details of that in our heads, thank you very much), and to sleep. Which, in one of the film’s most chilling reveals, it turns out he’s been doing in the attic-space above the room where Cecilia is sleeping. In an incredibly tense sequence, Cecilia enters the attic and finds Griffin’s mobile phone, the knife he’ll later use to kill her sister and the portfolio he nicked from her ahead of her job interview. Interestingly, Whannell deleted a small scene in which Cecilia discovers that Griffin has drilled a hole in the floor, all the better to watch her sleep. A curious choice to delete, perhaps — the insidiousness of that voyeuristic act is perhaps the creepiest thing Griffin gets up to. And there’s a lot of stiff competition.
7 DINNER WITH EMILY
Chris Hewitt: Every time I’ve seen this movie — and that includes twice with fellow film journalists; some of the most jaded, cynical hacks you could ever wish to meet — this scene, in which Cecilia’s reconciliation with her sister, Emily, is rudely interrupted when Griffin slits Emily’s throat, and thrusts the murder weapon into Cecilia’s hand, has elicited gasps of utter shock. And I’ve seen it three times. It’s one of the great filmic shocks of recent times, its impact enhanced by the way Whannell skilfully lulls us into a false sense of security. This is a public place, Cecilia is safe, the sisters are coming together to form a plan of attack. There’s even a bit with an overly obnoxious waiter just to further make us relax. Then, wham: flying knife, claret galore, screaming punters everywhere. Because how can you truly be safe from an invisible man?
John Nugent: It all happens so fast that we are barely given time to process what’s just occurred. And Cecilia clearly does not immediately comprehend the scene before her, dumbstruck and frozen as chaos erupts in the restaurant. It’s a masterfully constructed sequence, with no hint or suggestion in the build-up that something terrible is about to happen — and then Cecilia’s life goes from bad to bloody awful quicker than you can say, “Surprise!”
Leigh Whannell: The scene in the restaurant with Emily was one where I felt if I got it right, I would really rip the audience’s face off. One of the things I was thinking was, “How would you exploit invisibility if you were an evil, malignant sociopath?” I thought framing someone for a murder would be really easy if you were invisible.
8 THE WONDER OF WHANNELL
Ian Freer: The Invisible Man represents an upgrade – pun intended — in Leigh Whannell’s mastery as a filmmaker, both in the mixture of new-fangled VFX and old-school horror filmmaking techniques. On the spectacle side, the film deploys a stunning mixture of stunt work and digital effects, seamlessly replacing Elisabeth Moss mid-shot as she is chucked around by Adrian. Yet it’s also built on a very traditional use of negative space — parts of the frame where nothing is happening. Oftentimes, Whannell slowly pans across an empty room while action continues out of frame, making you wonder what might be lurking in the shot. This is also heightened by the very un-horror like aspect that the rooms and corridors are very brightly light — you can clearly see what is going on — and when the film is called The Invisible Man, these spaces become — to use Whannell’s word — “weaponised”. It’s a film that also pays careful attention to its soundtrack, clueing us into Adrian’s presence when we can’t see him — witness the disappearing knife we should hear hit the floor but makes no noise.
9 A UNIVERSAL ICON
Not much of James Whale’s
John Nugent: original studio classic transfers to this reboot. But there is a nice blink-and-you’llmiss-it nod to the 1933 character design when Cecilia sees a man with a heavily bandaged face in the hospital. The spirit of Claude Rains lives on!
10 HOSPITAL ESCAPE
Chris Hewitt: Coming on like the bastard child of Terminator 2 and Predator, Cecilia finally fights back against her unseen tormentor in this extended sequence where she breaks out of confinement from her psychiatric hospital prison, only for Griffin to go on a rampage against security guards who can’t see him. Mostly. Whannell’s use of Griffin’s now-malfunctioning suit, which blinks him into vision for just a second or two, ups the suspense ante considerably, and it also gives him a chance to show off some of the nifty camerawork that characterised Upgrade’s fight scenes. Interestingly, Griffin leaves most of the security guards alive. Not because he’s not such a bad guy after all, but because he’s aware that floating guns and black-clad blips will show up on CCTV. The jig is up.
11 FINAL SHOWDOWN
Chris Hewitt: Just as Whannell started the movie quietly, he finishes it by subverting our expectations. When Cecilia arrives at Griffin’s house for dinner, we believe that she’s there to elicit a confession of his horrible deeds, so that friendly cop James can rush in and save the day. We suspect, and have steeled ourselves for, a final showdown between the two, perhaps with an invisible Adrian terrorising Cecilia once more before receiving his just deserts. Not so — instead, the just deserts arrive before they’ve even had their starter, as Cecilia, wearing an invisible suit she stashed earlier, slashes his throat.
There’s much to unpack here: was this a spur of the moment decision or something more pre-meditated? Cecilia’s sly smile as Adrian says, “Surprise” — a key word from earlier in the film — and confirms to her that he was behind her all-too-human haunting, would indicate the latter. It’s poetic justice for Emily, and best of all: Griffin never sees it coming.
John Nugent: By the end of the film, surely nobody can begrudge Cecilia her bloody revenge. She’s had such a rough time of it, Murphy’s Law should be renamed Cecilia’s Law. There’s been consternation from some corners that by killing Adrian, Cecilia only stoops to his level, that she becomes the new bad guy. But that’s not how revenge works in genre flicks. This isn’t social realism — we can be allowed a little bloodthirsty fantasy. And the final moments, with the invisible suit safely stashed away in her bag, sets up an intriguing future (either imagined or in an actual sequel) of ‘The Invisible Woman’, as a kind of unseen superhero, seeking bloody vengeance on domestic abusers everywhere. We’d pay to see that. Leigh Whannell: I wanted it to come full-circle. I wanted Cecilia to use his power against him. I love it when a movie folds in on itself. I opened the movie with Cecilia opening her eyes and the film finishes with her closing her eyes. I love symmetry. I think I’m mildly OCD.