The Invisible Man

Before I actually talk about Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, I want to go over the circumstances leading to its creation, as it’s possibly one of the greatest sequences of corporate hubris in recent history that doesn’t involve anything exploding.

A while back the Marvel-Disney entertainment construct released a little movie you may have heard of called The Avengers. It made a whopping 1.2 billion dollars per second at the box office and cemented a never-ending film franchise that’s gone on to forever alter the mainstream Hollywood landscape. Other studios, seeing that big crossover cinematic universes were now the face of blockbuster film-making (or at least thinking they were going to be and maybe forgetting that only one studio had actually pulled it off for real) started rooting around in their IP drawers for things they could use to launch their own cash cows.

Universal decided on their slate of classic monsters like Dracula, the Wolf Man, The Creature From The Black Lagoon and, of course, The Invisible Man. A lot of people have derided this decision as doomed to failure from the start, but it actually does make some sense: the Universal monsters comprised their own cinematic universe with crossovers and a somewhat consistent canon decades before the Marvel universe came anywhere close to getting on-screen, and you can also point to similar franchises like the older Godzilla movies. If it worked back then, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t work again now. Horror has always been a popular genre, with some horror movies being among the most profitable in cinema history. The idea was perfectly fine on paper.

Then they decided to turn their classic monsters into superheroes and also to not spend any particular effort making the movies good.

Universal tested the waters with Dracula Untold, a movie that I haven’t seen and which I’m guessing no one reading this has seen either. It promptly sank without a trace. Seeing this abject failure, the studio made the wisedecision to...try again, only harder. A reboot of The Mummy launched under the “Dark Universe” banner and Universal hired a slate of A-list actors to play action-ized interpretations of various classic monsters, who would presumably all get their own separate movies before teaming up in an Avengers equivalent to fight...I don’t know, Frankenstein or something. We’ll never find out, because The Mummy bombed even harder and Universal finally dropped the whole idea for good.

But all was not lost: all of those classic monsters were suddenly freed up to be turned into more interesting projects, without the baggage of needing to set up some grandiose cinematic universe. The first of these is the movie we’re talking about today: a post-Get Out “social issues” horror movie reimagining of the titular man who can’t be seen.

The movie opens with Cecilia Kass, played by Elizabeth Moss, escaping from her millionaire husband Adrian’s high-tech mansion with the help of her sister. Cecilia takes refuge in the home of one of her sister’s friends and his daughter, and two weeks later receives the good news that Adrian has killed himself. Unexpectedly, he’s also left her five million dollars. Maybe he wasn’t such a piece of shit after all!

Except not really, because it turns out that Adrian—a genius in advanced optics research—both faked his death and created an invisibility suit, and he’s using it to stalk and harass Cecilia. Alienating her from her friends one by one, Adrian slowly backs her into a corner with the intention of forcing her to return to him.

Now, I feel like I need to address something up-front: yes, “a dude uses a sci-fi cloaking device to gaslight his runaway wife” is a slightly silly concept on the face of it. The movie is stymied a bit by its premise here; it can’t lay any groundwork for this idea because most of the plot revolves around people not believing Cecilia, and that wouldn’t work if Adrian had showed off prototypes of the suit or the movie took place in a near-future setting where this sort of technology was becoming commonplace, and so the movie does sort of jump from “woman escapes from abusive husband” to “abusive husband has an invisible ninja suit” a bit too jarringly to be comfortable.

However, I’m willing to meet The Invisible Man halfway on this for two reasons. First, having spent too much time interacting with terrible dudes on the internet, I am certain that if this technology was ever invented someone would use it in exactly this way less than two weeks after it came on the market. And second, the movie that results from this premise is a pretty rollicking watch.

Wisely, Leigh Whannell and co realized that Adrian doing spooky poltergeist stuff to spook Cecilia wasn’t going to carry an entire movie, so the story effectively switches genre multiple times, starting as a low-key horror movie, then moving into tense psychological thriller territory, and then culminating in what is basically a straight-up action movie. I normally don’t like it when horror movies ramp up like this, but it actually works really well here as the movie never loses sight of its central and strongest idea, which is the inherent scariness of the invisible man concept.

And it is legitimately scary. The first third or so employs some really effective, subtle horror film-making, like an early scene where Cecilia gets spooked by a completely empty room for seemingly no reason. As well as establishing early on that she’s highly attuned to Adrian’s presence, it’s a great use of the Nothing Is Scarier concept. The movie establishes an atmosphere of paranoia and dread from the opening shot that never really lets up, even when Adrian is doing wild serial killer shit.

One aspect of the script that I really like is how it handles the issue of Cecilia’s psychological state. I think a worse-written movie would have played with the idea that maybe she is just imagining everything, but instead the audience gets unambiguous proof very early on that Adrian really is stalking her. At the same time though, Cecilia’s mental and emotional state isn’t exactly fantastic given the circumstances—Elizabeth Moss plays her like someone who’s just escaped from a cult and has forgotten how she’s supposed to act in normal situations—and you can absolutely understand why no one will take her seriously when she tells them that her dead husband is using an invisibility suit to harass her, especially with Adrian running around behind the scenes playing 4D mind games to pre-emptively make it look like she’s having a psychotic break.

It’s a pretty deft line to walk. Usually in stories like this I find that either the protagonist or the people around them will act irrationally in really contrived ways, but that’s really not the case here. It helps that Cecilia in general shows a complete lack of Stupid Horror Character traits: she figures out what’s going on more or less immediately, consistently makes smart strategic decisions and decides fairly early on that the correct solution to the Adrian problem is to stop dicking around and kill the fucker. These are all things I can get behind.

The script isn’t perfect, mind you. The movie occasionally seems to forget that Adrian is just an invisible guy and not actually some sort of poltergeist, and some of the stuff he does later in the movie only makes sense if you assume the invisibility suit also gives its wearer enhanced strength, which is never stated to be the case. There’s also some too-convenient timing when it comes to things like the suit malfunctioning in a very specific manner when Cecilia damages it—enough to do that cool Ghost In The Shell flickering effect, but not enough to actually hinder Adrian in any serious way. At times this brushes against the annoyingly prevalent trope of the omniscient bad guy who’s always five steps ahead of the hero, even when it comes to random circumstances that they couldn’t possibly have predicted.

But I’m willing to brush all of that aside, because at the end of the day the movie is operating as a metaphor for abusive relationships and the ways society at large fails victims. Most of the things Adrian does to Cecilia are just slightly heightened (and occasionally not even heightened at all) versions of things that real abusers do. And just like real abusers, when she finally strikes back he responds with horrifyingly disproportionate violence.

One final—and minor—criticism I want to lob at The Invisible Man is the ending, which is where the movie’s genre switching becomes a bit of a liability. The way the story wraps up is entirely appropriate to either the horror movie or the tense psychological thriller it operates as for its first two thirds, but it’s a bit too sedate and low-key for the action territory it spends much of its last act in. As a result, it’s a little bit anticlimactic even as the actual narrative conclusion satisfies.

Overall, I just really like this movie. Part of this is what it represents more than anything: Universal put out two soulless, bloated, corporate-driven, expensive cash-grabs trying to jump on an industry bandwagon and utterly face-planted, and then the one that finally worked is a lean, cheap (it had a $7 million budget, which is astonishingly low even keeping in mind the hidden marketing costs) little movie that was driven by the passion and creativity of the principal creators (Elizabeth Moss apparently had a large role in shaping the story alongside Leigh Whannell’s writing and directing). 

I’m normally reluctant to start narrativizing Hollywood too much—that’s how you get into weird “this giant multi-billion dollar studio is the scrappy underdog and this other giant multi-billion dollar studio is the greedy corporate villain!” fan nonsense—but it’s impossible not to see this as a repudiation of the made-by-committee franchise approach. It’s almost like hiring skilled creative people to work on projects they actually care about yields positive results, who could possibly have predicted that?

But in an unexpected twist, there’s a possibility that Universal might get their big monster universe after all: Leigh Whannell is currently down to direct both a Wolfman reboot and an Invisible Man sequel—I guess that makes him Universal’s Zack Snyder or Joss Whedon—which, based on the direction this one goes in and the fairly obvious sequel hook at the end, could easily get into a more actionized superhero-esque direction.

Right now there’s no suggestion that these or any future monster movies will actually go down that route, but if they did it would be a pretty expensive lesson for Universal: after dumping tons of money into two failed attempts to impose a cinematic universe from the top down, they’d finally be succeeding via the Marvel “make some stand-alone movies and see if people like them” approach, AKA the only method that’s actually worked for anyone.