Director: Leigh Whannell
Writers: Leigh Whannell, Leigh Whannell
Stars: Elisabeth Moss, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Harriet Dyer
Run Time: 2 Hours 4 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3bVRX0z
Synopsis
Cecilia wakes up in the middle of the night, and we see that she has drugged her boyfriend, Adrian, so that he won’t wake up. She packs up all her stuff, and it’s obvious that she’s leaving him. She goes downstairs into the super high-tech lab to disable the alarms. It’s all very tense, and we can see that she’s terrified that he’ll wake up and catch her. It’s all going well until she sets off the car alarm by accident. She runs through the woods, and we can see that the boyfriend has awakened. He catches up to her just as her sister arrives in a car to pick her up. She makes a very narrow escape…
Two weeks later, Cecilia’s staying with her sister’s boyfriend, James, and she’s terrified that Adrian is going to come after her. Emily comes over and explains that Adrian is dead. He committed suicide. Cecilia explains what Adrian had been doing to her, and it was pretty bad. “You’re here with us now. You’re safe, and he’s gone,” says Emily.
Adrian’s will leaves five million dollars to Cecilia, provided she’s not found guilty of any crime or a few other fine-print details.
Cecilia starts getting the strange feeling that someone is watching her. We start seeing lots of wide-angle shots that show just how much open space there is in Cecilia’s life. She finds the front door standing open in one of these scenes. She goes outside, and it’s cold. We see her breath. We see an additional breath from someone who’s standing behind her. The blankets get pulled down at night. We start to see signs that there is actually an invisible man stalking her.
Things start going wrong for Cecilia after that. Her work goes missing, and she passes out in a job interview. The doctors blame it on all the Diazepam she’s been taking, except she hasn’t been taking it; that’s what she had been drugging Adrian with. She talks to Adrian’s brother, Tom, and she begs him to get Adrian to stop, but he knows nothing about it. Soon, she learns that her computer has emails that “she” has sent to her sister, and that goes badly.
She starts blaming “him” for all kinds of bad stuff, and no one believes her. Everyone thinks she’s going crazy and blaming the dead man for all her troubles. She gets thrown out of James’s house, her sister won’t talk to her, and it only gets worse from there.
Commentary
How do you know there’s not an invisible man standing next to you right now? This film is all about paranoia and schizophrenia. How would you explain or prove that an invisible man was tormenting you without sounding like a crazy person?
As far as using a Universal Classic Monster for this story, I’m not pleased. Surely someone with an invisibility suit could come up with something more large-scale or ambitious than stalking an ex-girlfriend? The original Invisible Man film had the highest body count of any of the Universal films, this one, not so much.
The ending was a bit unexpected, but I did like that part. Overall, I did like it, but it also feels like a wasted opportunity.