The Invisible Man
Putting a modern twist on iconic horror stories is a tricky business, as many filmmakers can attest to. In his way of adapting “The Invisible Man,” writer/director Leigh Whannell manages to do this in a way that honors the source material, and delves into the psychological dread for a victim of this particular monster. Of course, whether the monster actually exists is open for discussion, and a big part of where this film gets its tension from.
One of the best ways Whannell adapts this Universal monster is not by just remaking the film from the point-of-view of the particular “monster”- in this case, the narcissistic and controlling Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen)- but his prime victim, Cecilia Kass, played by the fantastic Elisabeth Moss. Our first images in the film are her getting out of bed while Adrian is asleep, and making a late-night escape from their secluded home with her sister, Emily (Harriet Dyer), as the driver. Through circumstance, he gets up in the middle of the escape and shows his rage over her before they drive away, leaving him to pick up a bottle of pills Cecilia has dropped on the ground. This is a film about a woman’s personal Hell, manifest in a particular form of gaslighting she attributes to Adrian, after he has supposedly killed himself, which no one else can see evidence of. How Whannell is able to tap into that as a writer and director is a credit not just to him as a filmmaker, but as an individual.
Staying with Cecilia is the only way this film would have successfully worked, and Moss gives a sensational performance that digs into the anxiety and unhinged emotions the character is experiencing long before she gets out of that house in the beginning. What little we know of Adrian, from his explosion of anger when he catches up with the car to when his brother, and the executor of his will (Michael Dorman), is trying to read a letter Adrian wrote to Cecilia before he “died,” is enough to make us feel empathy for Cecilia, especially when the titular character begins to terrorize her, and seem to set her up to be crazy. Admittedly, the first hour of the film felt a bit slow in building up to its bigger moments, one of which is one of the most shocking moments in recent horror history, but what it builds to is as powerfully staged a crescendo of suspense, stress and emotional release as any mainstream horror film has delivered in recent memory. When a “remake” can make the old monsters feel new again, you know a film has accomplished something. Leigh Whannell has done something with one of the great Universal monsters that makes us remember not just why it was scary in the first place, but also create a modern version that speaks to ideas society is reckoning with in the present. That’s what the best horror films have always done, and “The Invisible Man” makes us terrified of where those ideas can lead.
