I Like to Watch | The Invisible Man (2020)
When I was a kid, back in the seventies, I loved the Universal monster movies. My mom would buy me the plastic model kits of the Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I’d glue them together and paint them. For a few years, these models adorned shelves in the room I shared with my little sister. I was so taken with the Monster Movies, the first film I recall crying at was King Kong as I suppose I identified more strongly with the ape than the humans.
I’m not a huge fan of the Broadway musical Wicked yet I love the source material. The idea of taking a fairly well-known story and pivoting it from the hero’s perspective to that of the villain and seeing it played out is not only fun, it is instructive as to how false is the Good vs Evil binary.
I’m also taken with the Big Metaphor idea: take an existing tale and reframe as a metaphor for something contemporary. Dawn of the Dead — zombie apocalypse as metaphor for rampant consumerism. Frankenstein and Jurassic Park — monsters in the world created through the human need to let science make us god-like. Dracula — the vampire as metaphor for everything from xenophobia to AIDS to moral restrictions on sexuality.
The skill required to make these spins on both popular culture and metaphorical storytelling is one of balance. Too much “on the nose” and the story is lost to the political ramifications. Too little referencing of the source and point of view and it all just becomes an unmemorable waste of time.
Both Get Out and Us are great films but, for my money, Us is superior because the “lesson” is less obvious than “White People Are Evil.” Peele is brilliant and manages to find that balance for the most part but Get Out is almost impossible to see as simply a horror story as the politics gets in the way. Which, hell, might be the point but I prefer my horror films to be horror first, political intent second.
The recent Blumhouse prestige horror film is The Invisible Man and it strikes a near-perfect balance. Telling the story of the insane scientist who discovers how to render himself invisible but from the perspective of one of his victims is fun. It is also laden with the comparison to a woman desperately trying to escape a brutally abusive relationship.
The 1933 Claude Raines vehicle was all about the insane monster — a man who discovers invisibility and comes back to wreak havoc by committing “a few murders here and there.” The 2020 updates the tale to reflect the experience of a woman he has abused and, once she has escaped the domestic violence, is subjected to his invisible stalking and psychological torture while no one believes her.
Elizabeth Moss grounds this thing. Christ, the first ten minutes or so are completely silent as she escapes his house while trying to be as quiet as possible. The terror on her face, the urgency of her escape is almost physically exhausting to watch. Her performance sets the stage for the stakes of the rest of the film.
Once she is safe, she is not safe. First, because she suffers from a PTSD of sorts, terrified of random joggers on the road, spooked by things that don’t quite sound right. Helped by her sister and her sister’s policeman boyfriend (and his daughter), she has allies gently guiding her. Second, this is The Invisible Man we’re watching and knowing that means the tension never releases. You know he’s going to show up. You know that no one will believe her.
Writer/director Leigh Whannell knows how to balance the classic horror elements with the #MeToo message perfectly. Unlike, say, the rebooted Charlie’s Angels (so one note feminist that the three characters are all beautiful, brainy, and badass which leaves virtually no weakness in the heroines of the tale thus no stakes) or the Harley Quinn vehicle (where the battle cry of WOMEN UNITE! is writ large in almost every single scene), Whannell gives us a truly scary thrill and still underscores a message about the trauma domestic violence creates and the journey of simply not being believed when you know you haven’t escaped.
Monster movies almost always have a metaphor for something going on in society. Godzilla is about man flirting with atomic energy, The Mummy is about our thirst for knowledge desecrating the religious history of ancient cultures, The Wolfman covers the ground of our bestial sexual nature. I never really had a bead on The Invisible Man and I suspect that’s why I was never really into him (also there was no plastic model).
With this most recent retelling, from the lens of his victim, The Invisible Man now feels like a serious classic monster.
