You will know that The Invisible Man (2020) is a great horror film once you mumble to yourself, halfway through, something along the lines of ‘I didn’t see this coming’. The pun will be completely spontaneous and unintentional. Even after your defences are alerted and you begin to expect the unexpected, you will continue to be blindfolded to what’s coming. In this way, the man behind the camera, Leigh Whannell, has constructed the screenplay as an almost invisible presence––trying to see what is around the corner will not work––and with that, he has given it the vantage point of looking at the audience without being looked back.
The story itself begins with what appears to be the end of a relationship. Cecilia Kass (Elizabeth Moss) has planned her nightly escape from Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a wealthy optics researcher, for seemingly a long time. It is later confirmed that this was, in fact, an abusive relationship. She finds a great support system in her friend James (Aldis Hodge), who accommodates her, and her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer), who picks her up from Adrian’s palace of a house. After Cecilia learns that Adrian has committed suicide, she notices odd phenomena, some of which are your run-of-the-mill horror-film occurrences: the re-appearance of the lost object, the dragging of the bedsheets, the missing knife. It doesn’t take long for Cecilia to suspect and then ‘see’ that someone invisible is terrorising her and trying to isolate her. She is untrue to her name, which etymologically leads back to ‘blindness’.
The best horror films contain or put in operation apt metaphors for dreadful life experiences. Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), for instance, resonates with viewers because it constructs sophisticated portraits of American racial politics and the afterlives of slavery. Whannell knows this. After all, he has been James Wan’s writing hand in Saw (2004) and Insidious (2010), two of the most prominent horror films of the 21st century. In The Invisible Man, the metaphor is powerful, albeit familiar: abusive relationships are so traumatic that they continue to haunt the victim-survivor long after they end; the toxicity of the past not only remains but hovers over like a ghost; the possessive perpetrator (often male) seems to possess, mentally, the survivor (often female).
Yet, the film works brilliantly because this metaphor is turned upside down and inside out; the haunting is real, the ghost is literalized. As Cecilia is terrorised by what seems to her as an invisible Adrian, however, she is perceived as someone who is keeping her abuser alive in her mind, someone who is letting her imagination run on. Granted, this was the invisible man’s plan to begin with, but the message is still a politically charged one: there is a willingness to accept that the survivor is more damaged than truthful, that her testimony is an excuse for becoming what she was running away from.
Cecilia’s character is developed up until the closing credits and she is, in fact, transformed into a modern Eurydice, one who is dragged by the hair to the underworld and must save herself. It’s a scary underworld, full of empty corners that come dangerously alive, with plenty of disembodied knives and guns. Perhaps prepared by her role in The Handmaid’s Tale, Moss knows what to do with a character who is cornered. She communicates pain alongside strength in strange ways here, almost as a new symbiotic emotion. And while Aldis Hodge can match her considerable talent, it is a shame that his character remains flunctuatingly intelligent for the entirety of the runtime. His keenness to believe what’s unbelievable in some situations but not others is often frustrating and almost always at the convenience of the plot.
The Invisible Man could have been merely a good horror film by comparison, especially because of the state of the genre and as it follows Fantasy Island (2020) and Brahms: The Boy II (2020), two recent contributions to the genre’s bad name. That would have been easy and lazy and, if nothing else, Whannell proves here that he is not a lazy man, utilizing a small budget to the utmost effect. It turns out to be a great horror film. You will know once you go home, hang your coat, and stare at it with the hope that it will not move during the night.
Christos Kalli, born in Cyprus, recently graduated from the University of Cambridge. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Ninth Letter, the National Poetry Review, the American Journal of Poetry, the Adroit Journal, the Los Angeles Review, the minnesota review, PANK, The Hollins Critic, Harpur Palate, and Dunes Review, among others. His chapbook INT. NIGHT / Nightscarred was a finalist for the Sutra Press Chapbook Contest (2017/2019). From 2017 to 2019, he has served on the editorial board of the Adroit Journal. Visit him at christoskalli.com
