The Invisible Man - Cheap Thoughts

In a lot of ways Horror is one of the purist genres of cinema, and as bold & pretentious as an opening line like that may seem, there’s a lot of truth behind it. From film’s earliest days dating back to German expressionism, it was a genre that allowed filmmakers to experiment and challenge both themselves and the audience, giving us as a chance to explore the darker and more uncomfortable sides of humanity, to focus on the emotional rather than the logical, and more often than not the best of the genre will follow this description, The Invisible Man follows it to a tee.

Though not subtle in its message, it is in its execution thanks to Leigh Whannell’s direction and Stefan Duscio’s cinematography, highlighting the implication of what’s there, filling the frame with mostly negative space and let the lack of clues fill the audiences imagination, yet still treating the titular Invisible Man as a perceivable being and framing him as so. From scene one of our protagonist Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) trying to sneak around the house, the tension is instantly present and never lets go. There’s an argument to be made that Invisible Man is simply using an aged formula, after all flashy comments such as “It’s what the audience doesn’t see that’s scarier” it’s hardly an original perspective, and true it’s a tested and proven system that applies to most of the best horror films, and Invisible Man is so obvious in its message that it’s hardly worth commenting on as you’ve probably already figured it out simply by the trailer.

There’s an undeniable simplicity to Invisible Man, that can’t be argued, but rather than treat that as a flaw, it instead gives way to allowing the filmmakers to craft a film with creative visuals, adapting the story for a modern setting & technology, and an emotionally raw performance from Elisabeth Moss as a broken woman suffering from paranoia, abuse and rage to combine it all into a complex protagonist who is forced to deal with the trauma of being psychologically and physically abused by this intangible psychopath.

Blumhouse Pictures created a name for themselves for developing low-budget horror films that turned a massive profit that always made them admirable from a business standpoint, but it also resulted in many years of garbage forgettable horror, but in the past several years they’ve turned that around and made them one of the more interesting production companies in the industry right now. Should this film lead to a trend of allowing auteur filmmakers take their crack at adapting the original horror monsters into a modern setting then this is certainly a strong introduction. Hell, you could probably make an argument for Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water being the one to kick start this trend with his interpretation of Creature From The Black Lagoon but after Universal’s several failed attempts to start their own reboot of these characters, putting everything into the hands of Blumhouse might not be such a bad idea if they were to turn out other stellar flicks such as this one.

-Danny