Based on the 1897 H. G. Wells novel, The Invisible Man (2020), written and directed by Leigh Whannell, involves a woman who believes she is being stalked by her now invisible wealthy ex-boyfriend following his suicide. However, things may not be as they seem in this modern tale of trauma and psychological terror.
On the surface the film’s synopsis sees Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) leave violent boyfriend Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and subsequently suffer the traumatic after-effects of a violently abusive relationship. She goes to stay with childhood friend Detective James Lanier (Aldi Hodge) and his daughter Sydney (Storm Reid) to make a fresh start. But it does not end there: even after Adrian’s supposed suicide, Cecilia believes she is being hunted by an invisible Adrian, and she struggles to convince her friends and family of her unseen torment. After suffering further at the hands of the invisible man, Cecilia is eventually admitted to a mental hospital following her sister Emily’s (Harriet Dyer) murder in a restaurant; Cecilia claims she is being framed for the murder by the invisible man. She manages to escape the hospital after confronting her unseen attacker, but he takes the fight to her friend James’s house. After Cecilia shoots the invisible man, he is unveiled as Adrian’s lawyer brother, Tom (Michael Dorman), and Adrian is discovered imprisoned in his home. Not convinced it was Tom taunting her, Cecilia arrives to have dinner and ends up adopting the invisible suit herself and murdering Adrian, making it appear to be suicide. Cecilia is free at last.
Check out the trailer for The Invisible Man here:
But what if there was no actual invisible man? What if Cecilia descended into a form of trauma-induced madness after suffering horrific mental and physical abuse? What if the invisible man is a product of her own troubled psyche?
Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss)
Let’s begin with the first part of the film…. We see Cecilia leaving Adrian by drugging him with Diazepam. The scene has many suspenseful moments as she sneaks out, and there are clear implications of domestic violence– setting Adrian up as the villain and Cecilia as the victim. We see Cecilia drop her Diazepam on the road as Adrian chases her after her sister Emily picks her up. But did she imagine this? Diazepam, aka Valium, is used to treat anxiety and alcohol withdrawal and can have severe side effects with prolonged overuse, such as hallucinations, increased agitation and trouble sleeping. Perhaps Cecilia never dropped the drug, and perhaps she never stopped taking it. As Cecilia settles in with James and his daughter, she is very clearly traumatised by her marriage. After she learns of Adrian’s suicide, Cecilia would likely feel guilt as well as relief, and whilst this fact is never raised in the film, it is common to for abuse victims to feel that it’s their fault—a feeling that may have redoubled after Adrian’s suicide.
Adrian’s (apparent) suicide triggers the next part of the film and, I suggest, the next stage of Cecilia’s madness – in which she begins to be stalked by the invisible man (Adrian). Friends and family, however, see her as traumatized and only psychologically (not literally) “haunted” by Adrian’s presence. Multiple events occur that convince Cecilia that Adrian is hunting her, although when she tells people about it, it only serves to convince them that she is unraveling. Cecilia faints at a job interview, and Diazepam is discovered in her blood stream. Although Cecilia claims that Adrian has drugged her, it could mean that she never dropped the bottle on the road but has continued to take the pills. James’s daughter Sydney is hit by the invisible man, and Cecilia discovers Adrian’s phone in the attic: both events could be real, yet they could also both be manifestations of Cecilia’s broken mind. Her seeming struggles with the invisible man could be happening only in her head.
After visiting Adrian’s home and appearing to discover his invisibility suit, Cecilia then reaches out to her sister Emily in a restaurant, and the invisible man slits Emily’s throat and places the knife in Cecelia’s hand, framing her for the murder. If the “invisible man” is actually Cecilia, this scene indicates that she has reached a breaking point and killed her own sister, speeding her descent into the dark recesses of insanity. Admitted to a mental hospital to await trial, Cecilia discovers she is pregnant. Adrian’s lawyer brother, Tom, urges her to return to raise their child, but instead Cecilia takes a fountain pen and attempts suicide, albeit only to lure Adrian to interact with her.
Cecilia’s suicide attempt (which mirrors that of Adrian) leads to the third and final part of the film-and perhaps the biggest twist. After Cecilia attempts to harm herself to draw out the invisible man, she manages to stab him with the pen repeatedly causing his suit to malfunction. A chase ensues between the invisible man and Cecilia, and she is not afraid to grab a gun and hunt him down. The chase ends at James’s house where the invisible man threatens Sydney and hurts James. Cecilia shoots the invisible man, and in a twist, it turns out to be Tom. Adrian has been imprisoned within his house the whole time.
The final scenes see Cecilia return to have dinner with Adrian where she appears to put on the suit and murder him, making it look like a suicide. In my reading in which everything happens in Cecilia’s head, this last part of the film could be what’s known as an “Owl Bridge twist.” A short story by Ambrose Bierce (1890), “An Occurrence at Owl Bridge,” centres on a hanging being carried out over a bridge. The man who is about to be hanged, however, manages to break free and escape –or does he? In fact, it turns out that he doesn’t: the escape is an hallucination of a dying man.
How might this apply to The Invisible Man? When Cecilia attempts suicide two-thirds of the way through the film, is she more successful than we think? What we see in the rest of the film could be her dying hallucination helping her achieve closure and reparation. She becomes the fearless hunter and takes down her invisible assailant; even his suit is damaged, so he becomes visible to her, allowing her to stalk him more easily. Perhaps she turns Tom into the one she’s hunting at the end because she saw him in the mental hospital and he upset her; perhaps she wants to confront Adrian at the home where all her trauma and turmoil began and so, dressed to kill, she imagines her finale at the place where it all began for her, where she began her descent into madness, with Adrian’s suicide.
Each of the three parts of the film end on suicide, or, more accurately, what appear to be suicides (although none of them actually are): Adrian’s (fake) first suicide, Cecilia’s attempted suicide, and finally Adrian’s “suicide” (actually, murder). The repeated occurrences of suicide hint at Cecilia’s trauma and even possible insanity. Her abuse at the hands of her husband has pushed her, I argue, to drug- hazed hallucinations, and she becomes so psychologically haunted by Adrian that he manifests as an invisible man, but as part of her– with tragic consequences. Above all, The Invisible Man represents fear – fear of abuse, fear of our own madness, and fear of what could happen if our minds ever finally break as a result of too much suffering.
You can stream The Invisible Man on Amazon:
Melody Blackmore is a PhD Researcher in Film and Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University, where she is working on an examination of the symbolic role of landscape as an unconscious space for madness in contemporary horror films. Having received a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and an MA in Interdisciplinary Psychology, she has devoted many years to researching the role of psychoanalysis in Gothic literature and film.
You can also check out a countering viewpoint on CinemaBlend.
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