From its very inception, H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (retroactive spoiler alert for a book first published in 1897) has always been a story about how quickly people tend to stop feeling guilty once you remove all apparent possibility of them getting caught. The titular character arrives in the tiny British village of Iping, already invisible, and making a total spectacle of himself by pretending he’s not — wrapped up in bandages, dark glasses, a cheap wig and an obviously fake nose, he’s a combination of mummy and burn victim whose foul temper and slovenly habits prevent anyone from feeling particularly sorry for him. “There MUST be a way back!” he keeps complaining, messing around with chemicals and running up bills…but by the end of the month, when the landlord finally calls the local police to help evict him, he’s already figured out that there really isn’t, and doesn’t need to be; if he wants to walk away from his mistakes, after all, all he has to do is strip down and run off naked through the streets singing “Here We Go Gathering Nuts in May” while pushing old men out of his way and stealing little kids’ bicycles.
“An invisible man can do anything,” Hawley Griffin — re-named Jack in the inevitable 1933 Hollywood adaptation — raves to his former colleague Kemp, with whom he briefly takes refuge. “He can rob, and rape, and kill!” Or stage automobile accidents, or wreck trains just for fun, or paralyze the whole of England with fear while he lies snoring in Kemp’s guest-room bed, etcetera, etcetera…but the minute people figure out he’s a man who looks like a ghost rather than a ghost masquerading as a man, his reign as Emperor Invisible the First is basically over, especially since his very condition means that if he gets beaten up or shot, no doctor will be able to treat him effectively. Death descends, stealing his erstwhile power from him by anatomical stages and leaving him nothing but a naked, broken, empty corpse.
Full disclosure: James Whale’s version of The Invisible Man (1933) is one of my all-time favorite films, which may make me not the best possible audience for writer-director Leigh Whannell’s 2020 re-imagining of the franchise. Which sucks, genuinely, since I enjoy both Whannell — previously best known as James Wan’s best friend/primary co-screenwriter, his movie Upgrade is a Cronenbegian body horror noir that paints a fascinating picture of near-future America while also managing to make grossly inventive carnage visually hilarious — and star Elisabeth Moss, his not-so-secret weapon, in terms of updating the tale in such a way as to make it immediately relevant to at least half the audience.
Spoilers ahead.
Whannell’s The Invisible Man begins with Cecilia Kass (Moss) and remains focused almost entirely on her throughout, relegating Hawley/Jack’s presumptive modern descendant Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) to a mainly-absent presence in “his own” story, literally and figuratively. Instead of a mad genius working on a potion so virulent it not only changes his bodily chemistry but possibly alters his mental state, Adrian’s effectively a diagnosed sociopath from scene one, the worst sort of controlling, abusive husband, as well as a self-made billionaire in the field of “optics” whose latest project turns out to be a suit that renders its wearer imperceptible to cameras and the human eye alike.
Not that we, or Cecilia, know that last fact right at the outset — when we meet her, she’s lying next to him pretending to sleep, waiting for the drugs she slipped him to take effect so she can escape from the bedroom, grab her carefully-hidden go-bag and hopefully get halfway to the highway before he even knows she’s gone. They met at a party, he charmed and married her, then gradually cut her off from the rest of the world until she was living like a prisoner in “their” house, constantly afraid that something she did would set him off. Then he started talking about them having a baby, and she knew she had to run before he noticed she was still secretly taking the Pill. (E. Moss, always at the mercy of some dude who wants to dictate what she does with her uterus.)
Initially, Cecilia’s flight seems to go…well, not exactly perfectly, given the fact that Adrian does wake up when she trips an alarm and hot-foots it down the hill in time to put his fist through her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer)’s car-window, but fair enough. She’s soon installed in the home her childhood friend James (Aldis Hodge), a police detective, shares with his daughter, Sydney (Storm Reid). At first, Cecilia can barely stand to roll down her hoodie and look out the window for fear of seeing Adrian lurking there; just going outside to check James’s mailbox seems like an untenable risk, as Moss perfectly captures the after-effects of intense psychological abuse and manipulation, a study in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Then she receives a phone call from Adrian’s brother/lawyer, Tom (Michael Dorman), who gives her what must seem like the first good news she’s had in years: Adrian has killed himself — and better yet, he’s also left Cecilia $5 million in his will, so long as she can keep herself out of either the nuthouse or jail.
This is a trap, obviously. We know it (it’s in the title, after all); Cecilia probably knows it, though she hopes otherwise. But because Adrian has magitechnological access to invisibility, what neither she nor we really see coming (ha ha) is the particularly virulent way in which his ensuing campaign of phantom revenge is designed to do exactly what he apparently never could in non-“ghostly” form: undermine her own perceptions of her situation so savagely that he can finally make her doubt herself, make her think she’s going insane (or, increasingly, that she’s already gone insane). By Cecilia’s own testimony — and Tom’s, come to think — Adrian was already a monster, but the suit turns him into a full-on supervillain, able to re-write reality at will, or seem to…he can start kitchen fires, make Cecilia’s portfolio of architectural designs go walkabout during a job interview, send horrible emails from her computer, slip the same Diazepam she once gave him into her food until she looks like an unreliable addict and frame her for an increasingly violent series of crimes that separate her from her support system, eventually culminating in a murder charge that gets her put on a hold for psychiatric evaluation. Call him Captain Gaslighter.
As he proved in Upgrade, Whannell’s particularly good at thinking through both the character and design details that render science fiction-based horror believable. He’s absolutely able to make us identify with Cecilia and her struggle to free herself from the wreckage of her awful marriage, especially during the painfully brief sequence right after her first meeting with Tom, when she genuinely thinks things are settled and is having fun spending Adrian’s cash on the people who’ve helped her. This, in turn, makes us far more likely to believe her even when she appears to down-spiral into paranoia, reverting not just to the fearful mouse we met at the film’s beginning but an increasingly unhinged woman bent on hurting what looks for all the world like empty air. We’ve followed her back to Adrian’s laboratory, after all, where she finds not one but three suits covered in holographic lenses that reflect and project simultaneously, covering the wearer with an illusion of whatever’s around and behind them. “He told me no matter where I went he could walk right up to me, even in the middle of a crowd, and I’d never see him coming,” she tells James and Sydney, Moss’s amazing eyes registering the exact moment when Cecilia realizes Adrian wasn’t speaking metaphorically. How can we not cheer her on as she fights back with any and every weapon she has to hand, taking just as much pain as she has to in order to force him to reveal himself in public?
But here’s the weird thing about Whannell’s version The Invisible Man, in hindsight, no matter how tense and engaging it is moment by moment — by reducing the story specifically to a power-struggle between Adrian and Cecilia, as typified by his continued need to utterly control both her behavior and her body, the film too often shows Adrian up as more a simple thug than a Machiavellian schemer, the kind of guy who’d rather grab his wife by the throat and make her “levitate” when he could get much more direct results by just standing in the corner and letting her hear him breathe while making her look like a complete maniac. Going by Cecilia’s anecdotes, he was capable of being seductive at one point, but now that they’re married, he doesn’t seem to think it’s worth trying to reawaken that part of their relationship; when Tom comes to see Cecilia in the mental hospital and drops the bomb that she’s pregnant, it’s presented as a fait accompli dating back to when Adrian supposedly switched out the birth control she thought she was taking just before she made a break for it. Well, far be it for me to advocate for rape in movies (even un-shown), but wouldn’t it have been far more horrifying if Cecilia had had what she thought was a sexy dream about her early days with Adrian at some point, then puked on her psychiatrist’s floor, been given a test and had to watch it turn positive even as she was still arguing about how that couldn’t possibly be the reason? And why not show Adrian being fake-solicitous, fake-pleasant, fake-gentle the night before Cecilia runs off, with her lying back to him just as ably, before then showing her tension and fear as she lies awake waiting to run? Is Whannell afraid that making Adrian look even vaguely complicated might cause us to not sympathize with Cecilia? (Again, hello: you cast Elizabeth Moss. You’re fine, dude.)
Ah, well. Call it an idea for the sequel, perhaps, much like the foundational spectacle Whannell for some reason chose to omit, this time around — that of watching a person actually born with morals discover that when you can get away with anything, unseen and unblamed, you just might find the scope of what you choose get away with to doing becoming…wider. After all, can an invisible man ever really be a hero?
What about an invisible woman?
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