It took me a little while to really jump on the Leigh Whannell bandwagon, but now that he’s done The Invisible Man, I’m not jumping off anytime soon.
To start, absolutely intrinsic to the film’s drama is the form; the editing and the cinematography both give us a sense of, at once, complete clarity and a slight unease that completely undoes that clarity. In many scenes, we’re meant to understand the environment in full precisely as a means of disorienting us.
What’s particularly interesting is how the form compliments the way the narrative progresses. The first implication of the title character’s presence is found at the end of a happy scene between Cecilia (Elizabeth Moss) and the family hosting her (father and daughter James and Sydney Lanier, played by Aldis Hodge and Storm Reid respectively). The scene is brief but lovely; Cecilia has used part of the massive will left by supposedly dead ex Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) to pay for Sydney’s college. They drink, they celebrate, they have a grand time.
A grand time that is fragmented by an ominous shot of the happy moment, the camera peering distantly from the hallway.
Watching. Waiting.
In the following scene, Cecilia is hanging up some new clothes. As she unpacks the clothes, the camera pans to the other side of the room. She eventually walks to this other side of the room, establishing some comfort (the pan wasn’t irrelevant to what she was doing), but its initial irrelevance to her actions puts us on edge, and makes us aware of the unseen.
These brief moments, unmotivated by anything we can see, evolve as the movie progresses. Whannell uses a few longer takes in the movie to establish geography, to establish that the characters know of the environment surrounding them, and to establish that this understanding will not help them.
Only understanding the man will help someone survive this nightmare, and this is where the brilliance of making this a story of abuse arises. This isn’t some “we’re more feminist now” flavor of the week like in 2019’s Aladdin or the most recent Halloween. It’s a perfect harmony of concept and drama, utilizing the supernatural to reflect on the natural.
Speaking about the abusive relationship at the center of the film, Whannell opted not to show a “day in the life” of Cecilia and Adrian, saying “I’m never going to be able to write a scene that will make Adrian as scary as the audience can make him. In my mind, I hoped that Cecilia’s reactions and the way she was acting told you everything you need to know.” This idea flows right into the supernatural elements, which means however good the rest of the movie is, however good the cinematography, editing and script are (and they’re great), the film doesn’t work if Moss doesn’t.
And boy, does she work. She sells us on every moment, happy and sad, terrified and brave. Most important is the balance she strikes between understanding the apparent absurdity of what’s happening and its real life implications. She knows what’s she saying appears impossible, and she knows it’s all true, escalating her performance to a point beyond simple fear or desperation. And she absolutely kills it.
Such a characterization, of course, is not new to horror, just as the the concept of an invisible man isn’t. It’s the freshness that the film brings to both of these concepts that matters. It’s why the concept of “escalated horror” annoys me, as horror is a genre that doesn’t need to be “escalated.” And The Invisible Man, an inspired remake of a classic, is a reminder of what this genre has given us, and what it can provide.
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