BEFORE: OK, now I'm officially late, and the prospects for catching up aren't great. This was always going to be my Saturday film, but since I lost Friday night and I have to work ALL DAY Saturday, then I have to watch this Saturday night, after a 12 hour shift, and (presumably) some kind of nap. I'm going to be wiped out, I don't know how I'll be able to stay awake. Hopefully this one will be just scary ENOUGH to hold my attention and make me afraid to close my eyes, that might be the saving grace. However, there's no way I can post a review until Sunday, so to me, that's late - even if I end up staying awake and watching it "on time", which for me, means late.
Amali Golden carries over from "Love and Monsters", she's got an uncredited role in today's film, but that's OK, because according to IMDB, she's in here somewhere, as "Annie".
THE PLOT: When Cecilia's abusive ex takes his own life and leaves her his fortune, she suspects his death was a hoax. As a series of coinciences turns deadly, Cecilia works to prove she is being hunted by someone nobody can see.
AFTER: OK, so I survived the long Saturday shift, somehow I managed to get to the theater before 6 am and open up, and get it ready for the school's Open House. As soon as we got all the tables and chairs in place, all of the teachers and volunteers showed up at the same time, and before I knew it, we were swamped with prospective students and parents, there to learn more about the college, I guess for next year? Damn, it's been so long I kind of forgot how college selection and admissions works. I guess colleges have to promote themselves to the parents so they can get that sweet, sweet tuition money and use it to pay the hourly wages of the worker drones like me, so, umm, thanks for considering art school, parents!
I somehow got home before dinnertime, on a weekend night when most adults just want to get out there and party, I saw a lot of people in weird costumes on the subway - well, more than on the average Saturday night in NYC, anyway. Coming home from the late shifts I can sometimes spot a drag queen or two, that's fairly normal now. Then I figured I'd watch TV and take a nap, but I didn't - and a couple of bottles of pumpkin ale didn't knock me out, either. Sometimes beer keeps me up rather than puts me to sleep - so 11 pm rolled around and I'd figure I'd start the movie, thinking I'd probably be asleep after 10 minutes, but I stayed awake! That's a good sign for a horror movie, remember that "Underwater" kept making me doze off, again and again.
All week, I've found my films at the intersection of horror and bad relationships, like "Colossal" and "Swallow" both riffed on women's relationships with toxic men, and this one fits right in with those. (Let's file "Lizzie" and "Love and Monsters" under "It's Complicated", OK?). "The Invisible Man" is about a woman trying to escape from a controlling husband, somebody who's rich and a big tech executive in the optics market (hint, hint) but wants to keep his wife under wraps at his compound, and be in charge of everything she does, says and eats. This guy could apparently be with any women he wanted, but then when she splits, his obsession goes into overdrive, and then he can't imagine himself with anyone else. Perhaps no other woman would put up with his controlling ways, and in Cecilia he found the perfect submissive - and of course, he desperately wants back the person he can't have. It all kind of fits, psychologically speaking.
However, not everyone would go to such extremes to get someone back, like faking their own death after crafting a will with such outrageous terms - Cecilia gets his entire optics fortune, but in monthly increments of six figures over four years, provided that she remains innocent of any criminal wrongdoing. (Now, why would THAT be in the terms of the will, hmmmm...). It seems her late husband is still controlling her, even after his "death", that's the easiest assumption to make, but for God's sake, why does she agree to these terms? Can't she get her own lawyer, and negotiate a better deal, like how about she gets everything right away and doesn't have to jump through any hoops? Or she gets to run his company as the majority shareholder? And to get the money, of course she has to sign the contract, provide her bank account information and her current address, what could POSSIBLY go wrong? That would only be bad if her husband was only MOSTLY dead, and wanted to stalk her...
I think this is the stupidest part of the film, perhaps, because with his invisibility power, Adrian Griffin can do so many things, he could rob jewelry stores or sneak into bank vaults, or if he's a total perv he could just walk into any women's dressing room or locker room, yet he instead devotes all of his efforts into winning back the ONE woman who is sick of him and can't stand him. Just move on, dude.
Before long, the film turns into a solid creep-fest, because, well, because we know it's called "The Invisible Man", and we know that sooner or later, there's going to be some hijinks caused by somebody we can't see on camera. I admit I had a bit of an advantage here, because ever since I got my hearing aid, I've been watching films with the captions on, and any notable sound effects are mentioned in the captions for the benefit of the hearing-impaired. Whatever technology the Invisible Man is using here apparently makes some kind of clicking noise, because whenever he was in the room, I got a heads-up about the clicking from the captions. That's a big clue that I should be looking for curtains moving, doors appearing to open by themselves, or chair cushions that are indented as if somebody you can't see is sitting on them...
But what's really clever here is the uncertainty, even if Cecilia feels like there's somebody invisible in the room with her, how can she possibly prove it? What if that noise she hears is just the wind, or the normal creaking noises that any house might make? Is that bump on the ceiling from an invisible person in the attic, or maybe it's just a squirrel that got inside, or an acorn that fell on the roof? Never mind that, what if she's going crazy? Certainly everybody THINKS that when she says that her husband is stalking her from beyond the grave, how do we in the audience really know what's going on in any particular situation? Is Adrian dead or not? Is Cecilia crazy or not? And where is all of this going to end up?
They kind of keep you guessing here - Adrian's brother just happens to also be his estate lawyer, so maybe he's in on the conspiracy. Is he evil or, you know, just a lawyer? He claims that he also hated how controlling his brother was, and so he's a sympathetic figure, for a time. But maybe he's a little TOO sympathetic, is that all an act? Cecilia's sister is very helpful when she's trying to get her life back together, but then she starts acting cold to her, what's up with that? By the time Cecilia is spreading dirt or flour around on all the floors, we have to consider that maybe she's just gone completely off the deep end.
Between this and "The Handmaid's Tale", Elisabeth Moss really has become the go-to actress for the neurotic doormat, I realize that her character was in a bad relationship, but when we first meet her she's got not only the fear of relationships, but anxiety over going outside, fear of being watched, intimacy issues, control issues, somehow she found the strength to leave her controlling husband, but then immediately reverts to a state of weakness. Where did that resolve suddenly go? Maybe it does work this way, I don't know - maybe the mistakes of the previous relationship do follow you around for months or even years. Sometimes literally.
But pity the actor who gets the news from his agent that he's got the starring role in that new big horror movie, only to find out that he's going to be playing the Invisible Man, and he won't be seen for about 95% of the film...
I'm trying lately to not overthink things, and just let things go when they don't make much sense. BUT, if I were still that guy who called out the NITPICK POINTS I'd be inclined to mention that even if a person were wearing a special suit that was covered in a ton of tiny cameras that could somehow each take a picture of what you might see on the other side of a person, and transmit that to a tiny screen that was somehow not blocking another one of the cameras, and thus it would appear from all the tiny screens together that you were looking THROUGH the person instead of at him, that image, theoretically, would never look QUITE right, because the angle would be wrong. You'd be across the room, so the image your eyes would expect to see, let's say of the wall behind the Invisible Man, wouldn't be completely matched by the one taken by the camera that was on his back, so I'd have to call B.S. on this technology, as depicted here. At the very least, even if the suit was working perfectly, you'd see a kind of shimmer as he walked by, as the projected images wouldn't totally line up right.
This project was originally going to be part of a shared universe for the old Universal Monsters, like Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman. Remember how Dr. Jekyll turned up in that Tom Cruise re-boot of "The Mummy"? After that movie tanked, the plans changed and so somebody decided to re-work the "Invisible Man" part of the franchise into a new stand-alone film, but one that really drew power from the #metoo movement, with a strong female character. So Johnny Depp was out as the main character, which is probably a good idea, because who would believe that Johnny Depp would be involved in a bad relationship, with a husband and wife each trying to get control over the other? Hey, wait a minute...
Then the film had the bad fortune of booking a release date in February 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to hit, and people stopped going to movie theaters. This was doubly ironic, since it featured a main character who for the first third of the film is under lockdown and afraid to leave the house. Still, the film managed to turn a profit, grossing $144 million against a $7 million budget, partially because it was played a lot in drive-ins, which re-opened in some parts of the U.S. before regular theaters did.
Also starring Elisabeth Moss (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Oliver Jackson-Cohen (last seen in "The Lost Daughter"), Harriet Dyer, Aldis Hodge (last seen in "One Night in MIami...."), Storm Reid (last seen in "Don't Let Go"), Michael Dorman (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Benedict Hardie (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Renee Lim, Brian Meegan, Nick Kici, Nicholas Hope (last seen in "Scooby-Doo"), Sam Smith, Vivienne Greer, Cleave Williams, Cardwell Lynch, Zara Michales, Nash Edgerton (last seen in "Jane Got a Gun"), Xavier Fernandez (last seen in "Fool's Gold").
RATING: 7 out of 10 camera pans to "empty" spaces
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