Starring: Elisabeth Moss, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, and Harriet Dyer
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Runtime: 124 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2020
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This American-Australian film is a contemporary retelling of the 1897 novel of the same name by H.G. Wells. It is also based on the 1933 film of the same name directed by James Whale that was in turn based on Wells’ 1897 original work.
There is a host of other versions of “The Invisible Man” that has spawned sundry versions of Well’s tale. They include multiple films, comedy depictions of “The “Invisible Man”, as well as a television series. This movie is clearly intended, directed and acted as a horror thriller. It stars Elisabeth Moss, who took the lead role in the television series, “The Handmaid’s Tale” (2017 – ).
In this film, Celia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) is a victim of a violent relationship with a wealthy boyfriend, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who also happens to be a brilliant “optician” and an accomplished scientific researcher. Late at night, she flees from his house to escape his emotional and physical abuse, and goes into hiding, helped by her sister, Alice (Harriet Dyer), her childhood friend, James (Aldis Hodge), and James’ teenage daughter, Sydney (Storm Reid).
After fleeing, Celia receives the news that Adrian has suicided and she wants to believe that he is out of her life. Relieved for a time, she starts planning a life that is free from abuse. Before his “death”, Adrian left her a generous part of his wealth to her in his will, and Celia is greatly perplexed by the fact he has done that, until a series of unfortunate coincidences start occurring.
Soon, the lives of those she loves are threatened, including her own, and Celia desperately tries to convince those around her that she is being stalked by a man, whom nobody can see. Nobody believes her, until they are forced to do so. A heavy musical soundtrack sounds multiple warnings.
Celia becomes increasingly convinced that her ex-lover is not dead. Adrian has turned his scientific brilliance into discovering a way of making himself invisible. The means he is taking to achieve invisibility is consuming him and turning him into a vicious killer, and the psychological effect of “being unseen” reinforces his drift into madness.
The stage is set from multiple directions in this movie to turn the film into a classic horror movie. With “invisible happenings”, much depends on the acting prowess of would-be victims. Moss is clearly up to the challenge and her hysterical reactions to unseen attacks elicit effective startle responses, that are well geared to Adrian’s initiatives as “The Invisible Man”.
The cinematography of the movie makes good use of shadowy spaces, where forces of evil classically lurk, as horror films have them do. The rapidity of incidents in the film keeps the movie firmly in thriller mode when unexpected events repetitively occur. Many intriguing themes are relevant to the plot line. A salient issue is the drift of Adrian into a form of madness that increasingly blurs the dividing line between reality and unreality and the film shows his journey from obsessive control of Celia to psychosis. Exploration of this kind might have been more telling, if the forces of darkness and evil in the movie (which are mostly associated with Adrian) were visible, rather than unseen. Evil not seen can be trickier in its cinematic impact than evil which is seen, and much is left to the viewer in this movie to react to things that can’t be viewed. For most of the film, but not all of it, Moss plays the fearful victim.
This is a horror movie that reliably startles, shocks, and creates surprises, two of which end the movie, and can’t be revealed because they are genuine “spoilers”. Both of them pack an unexpected punch. The story is acted well, especially by Elisabeth Moss, and the film is appropriately grim when required. Tension aptly accumulates, but the subtle nuances of what H.G. Wells delivered in his classic work await a different kind of movie.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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