Written and Directed by Leigh Wannell

Starring Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Michael Dorman

The Invisible Man has a lot going for it, but ends up being a movie you wish was a little better. Its premise, about a woman haunted by the trauma of her abusive ex, lends itself to deeper commentary than a straight forward thriller. The movie does thrill from time to time, but how quickly the great Elisabeth Moss doing battle with thin air becomes too goofy for itself. I groaned in agonizing boredom at a particular hallway scene in a hospital ward that just went on and on with uninteresting violence. It would have done so well to play more with Cecilia’s psychosis, and whether all this was just in her head. But this movie doesn’t want you think those thoughts for too long. It wants to be a good thriller, so it forgets about leaving things up for interpretation and instead gives you all the answers. Maybe it’s never going to get better than Alan Moore’s iteration, which led to Mr. Hyde locking himself in a room with the invisible man to reveal he has always been able to see him (what he does to him there you’ll just have to read for yourself).

The movie started out pretty good too. With no dialogue and  Moss’ raw talent, everything is established on the night she breaks out from Adrian’s grasp. Right from the opening you know the person she is in bed with is not someone she wants to stay with. I liked how quiet and effective it all was, the setup was all there. She’s been planning it for a long time. Cecilia Kass had been brutally controlled by Adrian Griffin for as long as they have been together. He’s a super rich scientist who specializes in optics (go figure). It works.

She escapes to her sister’s help, and stays with a friend of theirs  for a couple weeks in contained paranoid fear. She does not leave the house (sorta). Until news arrives that Adrian is dead. By suicide.

Though the news comforts her, she is summoned to the will reading by Adrian’s brother Tom. Adrian has left her millions. Contingent of course that she commit no crime/be deemed mentally unstable. You know where this is going

And now, pretty quickly, strange things start happening around Cecilia. And by strange I mean she feels as though she’s being watched. And the stove gets turned on high to set what she was cooking on fire. And her bed sheets get pulled off. And she can see the footprints of someone walking on them.

Look none of these moments are more than the sum of their parts. I said before the movie just wants to be a straight forward thriller, so we get some basic setups like this before it gets obvious that someone is there in every single room with her. The fight in the kitchen is also pretty lame, just more goofy effects that take me out of the movie. But people around Cecilia start getting hurt and no one believes it’s done by someone they can’t see. She’s made to look crazy. I’m not going to speak more about the plot since there are a couple of good twists in case people want to see this movie. It’s not that this movie is bad, it’s just it could have been so much greater.

I liked the cast of this mostly, especially Elisabeth Moss, who I don’t have to tell you at this point is a legend. She’s maybe one of a handful of people that could make this movie as watchable as it is. Her lead performance is mostly what kept me on the okay side of things. The rest do their job too, especially Michael Dorman.

Writer director Leigh Wannell (OH MY GOD HE WAS ONE OF THE TWO DUDES TRAPPED IN SAW WHAT) uses a lot of pans and plays with the focus. He’ll pan from stationary shots from left to right slowly and vice versa to indicate the invisible man is in the same room or an adjacent one to Cecilia. The focus choices threw me off, I didn’t get what was going on with that. Seemed more important than just highlighting an important object/person, but then the movie was doing it too often for me to care.

I think this is kind of a shame. They were good choices made here and there, and one of the biggest HOLY SHIT moments I’ve seen at the movies in a while. But all of it in service for a cookie cutter thriller. Where an ending has to be conclusive. Where there is a bad guy and he must be dealt with to satisfy a mainstream audience. And lackluster action to fill up runtime. And safe choices when riskier ones could and should be made. And a completely unnecessary shot thrown in at the very end at the behest of some lazy studio head who thinks moviegoers must be too dumb. I couldn’t believe it.

Overall though, I think it’s enough to be a weekend movie you can see if you feel the need. But anyone who watched those trailers knows that there was a better movie in here. Gone is the scene of Moss looking insanely at a chair and saying to others ,”there’s someone sitting in that chair”. The takes of her looking more insane with her face down but eyes up like she’s in Tokyo Drift at the dinner with her sis have been cut as well. And there’s another big problem with how someone….looks. And I can’t say more than that. But it’s dumb and distracting as hell.

I left The Invisible Man wanting more of a movie. Though it ties its ends up well enough, there just isn’t enough done with such a great premise for me. It barely makes use of its R rating, when Alan Moore blew that shit out the water. And I hear the original book is somehow even more disturbing. I think Leigh Wannell ignored those sources, and instead took his notes from Hollow Man.