The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell, 2020) was almost a very different movie. When Universal’s Dark Universe was still a possibility, the plan was to have Johnny Depp star as the unseen entity and overlap it Marvel-style with movies like Tom Cruise’s The Mummy. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Dark Universe producer and The Mummy director Alex Kurtzman explained that Universal’s original monster movies were “beautiful because the monsters are broken characters, and we see ourselves in them” (Goldberg). It is likely that, with Depp starring and driven by this idea of the monsters as beautiful broken characters, The Invisible Man we almost got would have centered on the scientist who discovers a way to make himself invisible only to find it damaging to his mental stability.
There’s nothing wrong with that story. We’ve seen plenty of examples of it, from the original Universal version of The Invisible Man in 1933 to the sleazy Hollow Man in 2000, starring Kevin Bacon and directed by Paul Verhoeven. It is, however, a version of the story that we are very familiar with: A man’s ability to exist unseen enables him to enact his base desires. Even though he becomes the villain, it is only after audiences identify with him as the protagonist that his peeping tom (or worse) side comes out. Although Alex Kurtzman may see this shift as exposing man’s beautiful brokenness, and may indeed see some of himself in such a character, it is a story that ultimately asks audiences to understand how taboo desires and lack of accountability might lead a man to do what he was unable to do when he was visible. I’m tired of that story, and, luckily, writer-director Leigh Whannell was tired of it too.
Here’s the trailer for The Invisible Man:
Whannell’s Blumhouse-produced The Invisible Man is smaller in scale than the Dark Universe version probably would have been. It tells the story not from the perspective of the title character but from that of his victim. One of the best actors working today, Elisabeth Moss expertly plays Cecilia Kass, who escapes from her abusive, optic-technology-developer boyfriend, Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s Adrian Griffin. Cecilia’s obviously thought-out plan to slip out of their swanky house on the beach after knocking Adrian out with some medication provides an opportunity to develop her character’s forethought as well as to establish the unfortunate necessity of needing to devise such a plan for what should be easy–leaving her boyfriend. The tense scene sets the stakes at the very human level, a showdown between a woman who survives her traumatic history with her controlling and abusive boyfriend.
A paranoid seeming Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss)
Soon after Cecilia evades Adrian’s grasp, he kills himself, and she can breathe freely for the first time in years. The film visualizes this likely case of PTSD in the form of Cecilia’s inability to leave the house where she’s hiding from Adrian; it is almost impossible for her even to get as far as the mailbox at the end of the driveway. The diegetic sound drops out and a low drone takes over the soundtrack, building the dread with every step Cecilia takes in the bright, seemingly benign daylight. Whannell is attentive to the way that abusive relationships can lead to the development of lasting paranoia, and he then uses this central idea to show the other effects of surviving a traumatic situation such as hers.
When Cecilia starts to experience inexplicable events (e.g., the near-immolation of her house when an unattended breakfast on the stove gets the heat turned up by nobody we can see; the disappearance of her architectural designs in a meeting where Cecilia’s trying to get a new job), she begins to suspect that Adrian is in fact not dead. Indeed, Cecilia starts to suspect that Adrian has found a way to make himself invisible and is torturing her into losing her grip on reality. To her sister (Harriet Dyer) and friend (Aldis Hodge), this theory sounds crazy, and Cecilia’s increasingly erratic behavior begins to threaten those relationships that are keeping her afloat. Whannell’s script isn’t particularly subtle when it comes to dialogue, and there are some clunky plot mechanisms that keep things in the domain of pulp storytelling rather than high-art. There’s no denying, though, that Whannell understands how a woman who survives an abusive relationship can be haunted by what she experienced – and how abusers use every tool available to keep their partners under their thumb.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the film employs vision as its central metaphor. When Cecilia escapes at the beginning, she does so by turning the cameras throughout their house off, except for the one she turned to their bed so she could see if Adrian was sleeping. Her name said aloud contains two instances of “see,” imploring audiences to pay attention to that act. Of course, an invisible man can go anywhere without being seen, but doing something that makes him visible, that shows who he is to the characters and audience alike, exposes him to retaliation. And the technology by which the optical inventor becomes invisible involves a suit made of thousands of cameras that happen to look like eyes bulging out and retracting in a mechanistic replica of the Tex Avery wolf-looking-at-a-pretty-woman Looney Tunes phenomenon.
Seeing means controlling, and being seen means you can be controlled. The film’s form plays with this concept as well. The camera sometimes moves in a slow pan across a room away from Cecilia sitting on a couch or down a hallway seemingly unprompted. Once you realize that the camera is still following a character—just one we can’t see—that movement becomes extremely creepy. Whannell’s script may have some lines that sound wrong to the ear, but he crafts a visually impressive film that shapes moments of true terror from using the camera to cue audiences into what is happening and what it feels like to be out of control. The fact that this little yet meaningful horror film was wrested from the jaws of a giant cinematic universe is perhaps the best outcome I could have hoped for.
You can stream the 1933 The Invisible Man on Amazon:
And here is H. G. Wells’ original novel:
References
Goldberg, Lesley. “‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Showrunner on Pleasing Fickle Fans and Adapting James Comey’s Tell-All.” The Hollywood Reporter, 19 January, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/alex-kurtzman-star-trek-discovery-adapting-james-comeys-tell-all-1174518.
The Invisible Man. Directed by Leigh Whannell, performances by Elisabeth Moss, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Harriet Dyer, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, and Michael Dorman, Universal, 2020.
Alex Thompson is a PhD student in English at the Ohio State University and runs a blog here. He has written previously for Horror Homeroom on A Cure for Wellness, The Witch and The Fits, on decapitation in Upgrade, First Reformed and Hereditary, on Phantom Thread, and on Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country.
