Rating: 4/5, good
I have long believed that invisibility is the coolest superpower. It may not be the strongest or the most useful, and it may have some serious drawbacks (like we saw in the Invisible Man book with the having to run around naked in freezing weather because clothes aren’t invisible) but it’s just visually so damn cool to see how the world reacts to human existence without seeing the human body itself. In the book, we saw footprints without the feet and snow settling on empty air. It’s effect where the cause is present, but not observable. It seems like a godlike power, as the only evidence we have of G-d’s power is the world bending around it.
The Invisible Man (2020) explores invisibility through the lens of abuse. Other reviewers have written about how The Invisible Man is about gaslighting and how difficult it is to convince others and provide evidence of abuse, but sometimes it’s difficult to even pinpoint and articulate the nature of the abuse. Sometimes you have the effect of being hurt without the cause of the hurt.
Throughout the movie, Cecilia knows it’s Adrian torturing her but she doesn’t always know how or even what he did. Narcissistic abusers aim to cause maximum pain with minimal identifiable marks that can be traced back to them.
The metaphor of invisibility for gaslighting/abuse is obvious, but apt. It makes for an effectively creepy refrain.
The only thing I didn’t really like about the movie was the generic scary movie wubs. You know that theater-shaking “WRRR-WRRRR” that everything from Annihilation to Midsommar does… it’s getting pretty old and repetitive. Even silence would be better at this point. It takes me right out of the scene because it’s loud and jarring and unnatural.
Otherwise, I thought everything was great. The sets and cinematography were really pretty and portrayed eerie high-tech sterility and emptiness. I thought the plot was pretty good and a major twist in the middle caught me by surprise and took my breath away. The fight scenes and the ending were really satisfying in my opinion.
We don’t get any of Griffin’s outsider angst that we do in the book, which I think is kind of a bummer, but I’m really glad that it was told from the perspective of his victim instead as it really put a new twist on the Invisible Man concept.
I’m still waiting on a real Victorian-era faithful adaptation of The Invisible Man a la Pride and Prejudice. There was one in the works that was going to star Johnny Depp but it’s being speculated that that got dropped because Universal’s other updated monster movie, The Mummy, bombed at the box office. As of January 2017, H. G. Wells’ work is in the public domain, so we may see some closer adaptations coming up!
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