A terrified ingenue insists she’s being stalked by an imperceptible villain. “Believe all women?” I can’t see any alternative.
Indeed, The Invisible Man, writer-director Leigh Whannell’s update of the 1933 classic, exists precisely to give shape to the phantoms we’re lately assured are everywhere, trailing victims in their wake but rarely leaving enough evidence to convict. The film is advocacy art to its core — a fantasia in the key of #MeToo whose intentions couldn’t be clearer if its protagonist were named Christine Blasey Ford. As such, its emotional and political climax comes not when star Elisabeth Moss finally rids herself of her tormentor but when a technical malfunction briefly reveals the scoundrel to police. “Of course he’s there,” you can sense every progressive in the theater thinking. “We’ve been telling you so for years.”
The movie begins in a setting the Left has recently taught itself to despise: a minimalist coastal fortress owned by a tech maven in the flower of his arrogant youth. Joining Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in residence is one Cecilia Kass (Moss), who commences the story by sliding from her lover’s obsessive clutches and fleeing into the night. There to meet her is a trusted sister (Harriet Dyer) with a plan to stow Kass in the home of childhood friend James Lanier (Aldis Hodge) and his daughter, Sydney (Storm Reid). Ensconced with the Laniers, Kass soon learns that Griffin has committed suicide and left her a fortune. And yet, like many wills whose terms drive the plot of a motion picture, Griffin’s has a catch. Commit a crime or be institutionalized, and Kass will lose every cent.
That all is not well in our heroine’s new life becomes swiftly clear as the film moves into its second act. A skillet bursts spontaneously into flames when Kass steps out of a kitchen. Bedrooms fairly throb with a ghostly presence. In more skillful hands, the trustworthiness of Kass’s perceptions might have remained ambiguous a little longer, allowing the audience to question her sanity before slowly coming around to her side. Whannell, however, is in no mood for such subtlety. His job is to scare us (into voting Democratic, if possible), and there are simply too many half-invisible fight scenes to be staged to spend much time lingering on Kass’s creeping sense of vulnerability.
As for those fight scenes’ quality, they are often quite good. Wrestling with her unseen foe, Moss flings herself around the set with abandon, gamely submitting to a catalog of hair pulls and body slams that would make a professional wrestler blanch. A long scene in which the invisible man takes out a psych ward’s security detail is similarly well-executed. Turning their guns on themselves, Whannell’s actors give the distinct physical impression of being gripped and pulled, a pretense on which the entire veracity of the movie depends.
Despite a late feint in another direction, the idea that Griffin is behind these high jinks is never seriously in doubt. In part, this is because while searching her boyfriend’s lab, Kass stumbles upon a machine that produces invisibility suits. (Viewers familiar with the law of conservation of mass may wish to avert their eyes.) But it is also the case that Griffin is too perfect a rogue, by contemporary standards, to be innocent. Played with dead-eyed relish by Jackson-Cohen (of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House), Kass’s lover is the platonic ideal of the obnoxious tech bro, from his unsustainable consumption to the monochromatic decor and open-plan design of his lair-cum-office. Is Griffin evil because he tortures Kass and her friends or because his company might, at any moment, swing the election toward President Trump? Why not both?
Like Knives Out, 2019’s insufferable immigration fable in murder-mystery garb, The Invisible Man means first and foremost to applaud the prejudices of its target audience. Unlike Rian Johnson’s Academy Award-nominated effort, however, Whannell’s film has no Daniel Craig to keep the rest of us entertained. Despite Moss’s brilliance in such TV shows as Mad Men and Top of the Lake, the actress simply lacks the gravity and watchability to be alone in the frame for much of a movie. Without question, the woke, white leftists who thrill to Moss’s other vehicle of female persecution, The Handmaid’s Tale, will find The Invisible Man irresistible. For everyone else, though, the picture feels like a missed opportunity: extraordinarily political, briefly scary, and not nearly as clever as it believes itself to be.
And so we smirk, yawn, and only occasionally shiver as Kass fights her way to the film’s inevitable conclusion — an ending so predictable that at least two moviegoers in my auditorium were visibly checking their phones at the height of its tension. Though I won’t reveal what happens, it can’t be saying too much to divulge that our last look at the invisibility suit sees it crumpled in Moss’s purse, awaiting further use.
Sequel, anyone?
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
