I was really anticipating this movie before it came out. I did my best to avoid the trailers because it sounded like a real winner to me. Elisabeth Moss plays a woman who is convinced that her abusive husband, now apparently deceased, is stalking her invisibly. Leigh Whannell isn’t a director I consider an auteur or anything, but Moss is one of my favorite actors and the film seemed poised to say a lot of interesting things about abuse and gaslighting. Well, you might be expecting all of this to take a turn now, but it isn’t going to because The Invisible Man is exactly the movie I was hoping it would be. Or, well, perhaps I should say it’s even better than that because it took some whiplash inducing plot turns at a couple of points that really surprised me. When I say it’s the movie I wanted, I don’t mean that it didn’t surprise me or subvert my expectations in positive ways because it definitely did that.
I mean, first and foremost, this is the Elisabeth Moss show and I’m board for that, let me tell you. And she does not disappoint with a performance that carries trauma in its bones. When the movie starts, she’s been deeply traumatized by her abusive husband and its evident in everything from her vocal patterns to her body language. After his death, she’s able to begin the process of becoming herself again, but then, as her paranoia grows, she becomes increasingly unhinged. It’s a star-making performance and, if the Academy didn’t pretend horror doesn’t exist, it would net her a well deserved Oscar nomination. Of course, 2020 is a heck of a year, so who knows? It’s one of the last movies to play in pre-pandemic movie theaters at this point, so maybe it’ll get some profile raising from that. The supporting cast is quite good. Of particular note is Michael Dorman as Moss’ weaselly brother-in-law, a man carrying his own trauma; it’s a performance with a lot of layers and he nailed them all. Harriet Dyer also makes a strong impression as Moss’ abrasive, hard-headed sister.
Then there’s the script, which is smart and sharp and cutting in the way it addresses the real world issues at the heart of the film. I expected the film to take longer before it lets the audience know for sure that there is an invisible man stalking Cecelia; I mean, it’s in IMAX, so there’s an invisible man, right? Nobody’s putting a movie about a woman slowly losing her **** and being wrong about everything on the biggest screen in the world. But the movie itself doesn’t even play coy about it, showing us explicitly very early in the film something that Cecelia doesn’t see; it’s a smart way to get us on her side without having to spend a lot of time doubting her. The film is at its most harrowing when it’s dealing with the profound trauma of domestic abuse in all its forms: physical, emotional, psychological. The invisible man here, genuinely one of the scariest villains in recent moviegoing, is a master at all three and the movie is nothing short of harrowing at times. Yes, there are a few jump scares and a couple that actually got me, but the movie also has a couple of really shocking moments of violence. There’s a harrowing scene of Cecelia just getting the everloving **** beat out of her and the thunderous sound design and Whannell’s unflinching willingness to just make us sit there and watch it for a painfully long time make the scene downright punishing. Whannell’s direction is, overall, quite good in my opinion; he isn’t the master at tension building that his old Saw buddy James Wan is, but he’s definitely a solid and reliable director for a movie like this. But for all the ways this movie deals with violence against women and gaslighting, it never feels exploitative or icky; it’s just a movie determined to make us contemplate the ugliness of toxic masculinity and all the ways it victimizes women. To the degree, honestly, that it might be triggering to people who have been victims of domestic abuse; or at least I found it intense enough to consider that. Anyway, at the end of the day, it’s kind of exactly what I said at the very beginning: it’s exactly what I wanted it to be. A smart, sharply written genre piece, anchored by a brilliant lead performance, that succeeds at both visceral thrills and raising larger issues in an organic way. Man, I loved this movie. 4 stars.
tl;dr – smart, sharply written genre piece boasts a brilliant lead performance; packed with thrills & shocks, it also has a lot on its mind in the areas of violence against women & gaslighting. 4 stars.