Somebody’s Watching Me… - The Invisible Man (2020)
From left to right, we have Dr Jekyll, Frankenstein’s Monster, Tom Cruise, The Invisible Man and the Mummy. We missed out on something glorious
While I’m still working on two much more ambitious pieces for the Chogg Blog, I’m finding the idea of my Flick Through Review format to be a little more disposable and maybe a better way to just throw stuff at the wall. Especially when I watch a film that I like well enough, but don’t feel like it has much more to say than whatever I can pull out at first glance. Which isn’t to say that The Invisible Man is a bad film! I thought it was actually pretty good. It’s a Blumhouse film, which always adds a little bias whenever I see it in the opening credits - Whiplash is a Blumhouse film, but then so are Truth or Dare and Night Swim. Another little piece of pressure stacked against this film being any good at all is the title. This movie, and giving the ‘Invisible Man’ character to Blumhouse, is what Universal is doing to get any money from its gallery of monsters after the spectacular failure of the Dark Universe. You remember? The cinematic universe to rival Marvel’s that began and ended with Tom Cruise’s Mummy film?
So things were stacked against this film. And despite it all, The Invisible Man is worth a watch. Elizabeth Moss is Cecilia, who escapes her abusive boyfriend and then finds out that he has died. The trauma has left her shaken, though, and she still feels like he is around her. Supernatural things happen, and the film presents us with two options early on - Cecilia is insane, or she is being haunted. When Cecilia discovers that her boyfriend had been working on a magical techno suit that is made of screens, cameras and mirrors that would allow him to be completely invisible, the new question becomes ‘Does this break the reality of the film?’
It comes dangerously close to being too camp, and then plunges over the edge in action scenes where people fight against nothing, and our protagonist gets the blame. But what makes the movie is the surprisingly decent writing of the relationship and its fallout. Cecilia isn’t just paranoid; she is damaged and constantly looking for proof that all the worst things in her head are real.
The film works best when it focuses less on the Invisible Man as a sci-fi concept and more as everything a survivor of abuse imagines ripped into reality. She is always being watched, every action is controlled, because somebody is in charge of how the rest of the world perceives her.
Oliver Jackson-Cohen is here; he is always so compelling to watch, but I won’t tell you anything else about his performance except that it is terrific. The film ends pretty brutally, though, with Cecilia letting her friend listen in on just how horrific and psychologically torturous the relationship was and then posing a question to him - and to the audience by extension. Wouldn’t you do anything to get away from that? Could you ever rest knowing that someone like that had loved you, once?
Thanks for reading this very short, but very nice to write Flick Through Review! Remember to share, to check out The Invisible Man, to stick your email in the little box at the bottom. If you like this format, stick a comment below or reach out to my Instagram and let me know! The next post will either be another short one while I work on my giant piece or it will be a monster of a post, so stay tuned! x
