By Brett Blake Universal's been struggling over the last decade with the question of what to do with what is arguably their most valuable -- and untapped, in terms of potential -- cinematic asset: their catalogue of Classic Monsters characters. We’ve seen them take the reverent approach (with 2010’s underrated, but also financially unsuccessful, THE WOLFMAN), the “revisionist history” approach (with 2014’s DRACULA UNTOLD), and the modern-era “building a cinematic universe” angle (with 2017’s Tom Cruise vehicle, THE MUMMY). For various reasons, none of those takes on the respective material worked out in terms of generating mass interest, so what we have now is Universal’s fourth course of action -- allow filmmakers with idiosyncratic ideas about the material to come in and tell smaller (and less expensive!) stories that don’t necessarily have to be direct remakes of their classic namesake films, nor do they have to tie together as building blocks of some kind of Marvel-style shared universe. The result? A fantastic, suspenseful re-interpretation of a classic tale (which dates back to a story courtesy of the legendary H.G. Wells) from writer/director Leigh Whannell. Employing some very effective cinematic techniques, Whannell reframes the Invisible Man story as a parable about domestic abuse, with Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) coping not just with the lingering trauma of a horrible past relationship... but also with the growing belief that her recently-deceased ex, a sociopath/scientist named Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), is still very much alive and tormenting her in an unseen way. The key distinction between this new film and Universal’s old Invisible Man films is that those movies tended to focus on the title character himself; we stayed with him, we got into his mindset, we followed his increasing madness and/or desperation. What Whannell does here is put us squarely on the side of one of our new Invisible Man’s victims. This shift in perspective has the result of making the Invisible Man a truly frightening figure, because we can see the sort of paranoia that he induces in our protagonist. The idea of there being somebody watching you, following you, harassing you... who you cannot see... is very chilling, and that flavor provides Whannell’s story with a great deal of its intensity. How can you really hope to escape a presence like that? The implications are genuinely very frightening, and Whannell explores them to great effect and for maximum tension. When shots of empty rooms are powerfully unnerving, as they often are in this film, you’ve done something very right. Elisabeth Moss is very impressive in the central role. Not only does she elicit deep sympathy from the audience, but she also layers in something even more interesting: the sense that perhaps she is truly being driven insane by the horrors being inflicted on her. There are twinges of madness that shine through her work in this role which add an extra layer of jeopardy for the character. It’s not just her physical well-being that’s in danger, but her psychological stability, as well, and there’s the implication that if she’s pushed far enough off the deep end, she might become just as dangerous (to herself and others) as the Invisible Man is. That Moss is able to thread the needle of conveying that angle without ever going over the top or losing the viewer’s desire to root for her shows what an adept performer she is. There’s also an element of the story that involves Cecilia’s friends and family being incapable of believing her that there’s an invisible man stalking her, but Whannell doesn’t overplay this aspect to the point of being frustrating; all the characters behave plausibly and sympathetically given the situation. Of course we want Cecilia to be believed, but of course those around her have reason to think her story’s nuts... because it is! Now, it is true that there’s very little of H.G. Wells in Whannell’s take, outside of the fundamental concept (a scientist named Griffin turns himself invisible, goes mad, and terrorizes others), but there is some classic Universal horror seasoning in here, not in terms of style, but in terms of how he approaches crafting this narrative. If anything, I think this INVISIBLE MAN owes a bit to the approach of Universal’s INVISIBLE MAN sequels from the 1940s, which were barely/loosely connected to the original 1933 film, and instead chose to take the underlying conceit but discard the actual plot strands of the Wells novel in favor of original riffs on the idea. Indeed, those films veered into quite different subgenres -- Revenge murder mystery! World War II espionage! Gender satire! -- just as this new film does by centering the tale around intense and very personal paranoia. Do I wish it had a little bit more of a throwback vibe? Yes. But when I really look at it, I do think this isn’t too far afield from what those old movies would probably look like if they had been made fresh in our modern era. And since that seems to be the underlying goal behind this update, I’d say Whannell and Universal succeed not just on that score, but on the even more important one of delivering just a terrific suspense picture. I don't know that I'd want to see every Universal Classic Monster get the modern day, high-tech treatment like this, but that turned out to be the exact right approach for this specific character. Despite being radically different, it's a worthy successor to the classic original.
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