The Dark Universe may be dead on arrival -- for now -- but its monsters can't be kept down. I've enjoyed the recent attempts at reviving Dracula and the Mummy, but it's fair to say that those big-budget exercises in mass market consumption lost their bite in lacking much artistic integrity. Leigh Whannell's The Invisible Man, though, is a magnificent outing for one of the most underserved characters in the Universal monster lineup, one that honors its source material while effectively and brilliantly updating it for a new age of gods and monsters.
We begin under a cliffside estate, a modern Gothic mansion at night, with floor-to-ceiling windows that immediately frame our story in a place of invisible walls. The only sound is from the pounding waves hundreds of yards below the bedroom from which a young woman is attempting to escape. Cecilia, we learn quickly, drugged the man in bed next to her (whose arm is still wrapped around her sleeping body) and has prepared to leave in the dead of night, stealthily getting her clothes, disarming the alarm, and trying desperately not to make too much noise. It's not until she finally gets off the property and into her sister's getaway car that her husband appears, shattering the car window and proving to us that he is a violent, controlling monster intent on keeping his property in his grasp.
Once Adrian, the man in question, turns up dead by suicide, Cecilia tries to rehabilitate herself into society. Living with her friend and his daughter, she learns to go outside again, exist in public, and even try to get a job. But something is terribly wrong: her breakfast goes up in sudden flames, a knife goes missing, her blanket is pulled off in the middle of the night, and her portfolio disappears just before her interview. Could these be the symptoms of Cecilia's cracking mental state? She can barely sleep, doesn't bother trying to improve her appearance, gets feisty and combative when people question her judgment. And yet we can't judge her because we've learned that she suffers severe PTSD as a result of her abuse at the hands of Adrian.
Whannell does a lot of great work here, no surprise, but I was most impressed in his focus on Cecilia. Played to stunning effect by Elizabeth Moss, Cecilia is a masterclass in rounded, dynamic character writing as well as heart-wrenching delivery. Often scrutinized through close-up shots in unflattering ways, Moss's face is a brutal canvas of terror. Her incredible control of every individual facial muscle notwithstanding, she manages to keep Cecilia from becoming a tortured wimp. She does get walloped a lot, and frankly a few of the more violent scenes were hard to watch, but everything she does is believable and sympathetic. How on earth do you try to convince others that your ex turned invisible when they already have a hard time believing that he's controlling and abusive?
This is a movie about psychological horror, to be sure, and the first half plays a line somewhere between Paranormal Activity and Room in its attention to Cecilia's mental and emotional breakdown. While we completely understand her stress and anxiety at suspecting that Adrian has returned from death and is invisible, we also understand the people around her who simply cannot accept that possibility. But Whannell complicates this already ambiguous story by showing us that Adrian has indeed returned. Well, "showing us" is perhaps the wrong phrase. While Whannell and his cinematographer Stefan Duscio work to isolate Cecilia in wide shots of an empty room or hallway, they brilliantly suggest all kinds of unseen horrors in the negative space around her. Often, nothing even happens, but we know full well that Adrian is there, somewhere, watching and waiting to pounce.
Whannell's screenplay is no less brilliant in its attempt to make a woman's forcibly silenced experience of abuse into a cinematic horror. Even if Adrian weren't always present, he would be; Cecilia can barely function without furtive glances down the hall or out the window. But just when the chilling psychological drama is wearing thin and you start to wonder if Adrian will ever really do anything more than creep around and take pictures, Whannell hits you with some of the most effective scares I've seen in a movie in a long time. I don't want to spoil it, but there's one scene of Storm Reid getting slapped that made me gasp and one scene involving a knife and a restaurant that made me yell out loud in the theater.
The turn to outright horror makes the final act of the film almost unbearably tense, and by the final sequence I had no idea what was going to happen. Suffice it to say that the finale sticks its landing and then some, and I could not have been happier with the film as a whole. This is no science fiction drama in which a mad scientist injects himself with a formula and can't reverse it; this is no super juice in a needle that may or may not unhinge his mind and drive him power-mad. Sure, there's some high-tech gear, but it looks suspiciously inspired by BDSM getup a la AHS: Murder House. This is pure, unadulterated real-world horror for the #MeToo era and for all time; the latter because Whannell's greatest feat is finally -- for the first time in any movie I can recall -- making a living, breathing invisible man as terrifying as he should be.
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