![]() Whannell uses it to stage the action with brute-force originality, as in a sequence where the invisible man, popping in and out of sight like a faulty green screen, cuts down an army of hospital security guards, one by one. The way invisibility is achieved in “The Invisible Man” is pure fantasy, though it’s been given just enough of a seductive “technological” underpinning. ![]() What happens next is jaw-dropping, oh-no-he-didn’t! crazy-awful-thrilling. But it’s just setting us up for the kill. ![]() For a while, her sister becomes her enemy, but Cecilia agrees to have a rapprochement with her in a very public place - a posh Chinese restaurant, where the movie catches us up in an acerbically funny scene that skewers the latest in unctuous waiter etiquette. They think she’s still so caught in Adrian’s grip that she’s hallucinating his presence. Moss acts with a slow-burn anguish that expresses the terror of how a bad relationship can keep its hooks in you long after you’ve shaken yourself free of it.Īdrian, now devoting his existence to torturing Cecilia (to the point that he’ll deny his own existence), launches his game of terror, and she fights back, even as those around her are convinced that she’s losing her marbles. But, of course, that’s all too good to be true, especially when Cecilia starts promising to pay for Sydney’s tuition at Parsons School of Design. Cecilia has even been named in his will she’s getting a trust of $5 million to be given in monthly increments of $100,000. Whannell establishes a mood of suck-in-your-breath paranoia, as the figure we assume is Adrian shows up to torment Cecilia. That’s why she wakes up with a hidden bottle of Diazepan (what used to be known as Valium), having drugged him to sleep, so that she can run out to the road below and be rescued by her sister, Alice (Harriet Dyer). The early scenes fill in the endgame of Cecilia’s relationship with Adrian, a sick-puppy genius of optics technology who plays like a more malevolent knockoff of Oscar Isaac’s control-freak tech guru from “Ex Machina.” Adrian lives in a remote glassy mansion perched high in the hills over San Francisco (its surveillance center looks like something out of the Batcave), and he has essentially made Cecilia his prisoner, promising to kill her if she leaves. She’s every woman who’s ever had to fight to be heard because her ordeal wasn’t “visible.” It’s the story of a woman who got sucked into a whirlpool of abuse and now finds that she can’t free herself, because the abuse remains (literally) out of sight. “The Invisible Man” is a social horror film grounded in a note-perfect metaphor. The traumatic power of Moss’s performance is that she acts out the convulsive desperation and rage of a woman who is being terrorized and, at the same time, totally not believed about it, even by those closest to her. That sounds like a standard hurdle the heroine of a sci-fi drama has to get over, only in this case the fact that everyone thinks Cecilia is seeing things - or, more to the point, seeing a tormenter she isn’t able to see - is the source of the film’s tingly, anguished resonance. But even they don’t buy what she’s saying. Cecilia, who’s crashing for a while at the home of her childhood friend, a courtly police officer named James (Aldis Hodge), and his high-school-senior daughter, Sydney (Storm Reid), makes a few fumbling attempts to explain what’s going on to them. ![]() But Whannell, who was James Wan’s original collaborator on the “Saw” and “Insidious” films, and who directed “Insidious: Chapter 3” and “Upgrade,” has something more pleasurably ambitious in mind. It would be easy to imagine a version of this movie that’s nothing more than a slickly executed victim-meets-tormenter-you-can’t-see, cat-and-mouse action duel. The idea of the invisible man as an aggressive invader, on the other hand, a human monster who can strike at any moment, creates a highly charged set-up for fear and tension, and the new “Invisible Man” is a logistical mind-game suspense film staged with killer verve. ![]() In James Whale’s famous 1933 poetic sci-fi horror film, the invisible man was a spectral presence, played by Claude Rains as a haunted but delicate figure swathed in bandages - one whose vanishing act was treated, in the end, as a kind of affliction. ![]()
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