The Invisible Man
directed by Leigh Wannell

The past decade has been fertile ground for the sort of quiet, stylish, bleak and cerebral international horror movies that writer Bret Easton Ellis refers to derisively as “art house,” lamenting the lack of gore and carnage and sex that characterized horror of his own youth in the 1970s and ‘80s. Bloodless stuff like Australia’s The Babadook is what Ellis is deriding, about a boogeyman who turns out to be a Jungian projection of a widow’s grief (or something), and Goodnight Mommy, a genuinely creepy German film that also turns out to be an admittedly eye-rolling meditation on grief. Or a metaphor for something.

But—and I don’t mean to suggest a source here—there does appear to have been something in the American moviemaking water supply since, say, November 2016ish that has generated a slew of earnest, reverent, inspired remakes of iconic American horror films (Halloween, Child’s Play, It, Suspiria), of which writer/director Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man is the latest installment. It stars Elizabeth Moss in what can only be called a loose adaptation of H.G. Wells’s 1897 novel, which was first conjured to the screen by James Whale in 1933, between Frankensteins.

Whale, like Wells, made the Invisible Man a protagonist and focused on his experience, his descent.

Whannell, instead, makes his Invisible Man into an almost nonverbal villain, insidious and omnipresent, the apparent ghost of a tech millionaire who holds his girlfriend, Moss, captive in a cliffside mansion from which she escapes in a tense and wordless opening.

Two weeks later, hiding at a friend’s house, Moss receives word that her tormenter is dead. Suicide. His brother, executor of the estate, will be doling out the $5 million bequest that the deceased has inexplicably left to his battered girlfriend. She’s suspicious, but prepared to get on with life. Her abuser’s dead, she’s found a job opportunity, she’s got money coming in. All’s well.

But now something appears to have followed her home. The seats of unoccupied chairs bear strange butt-like impressions. Unattended stoves are turned all the way up. A knife slides across a countertop, a bed sheet is pulled to the ground. It’s a slow and crafty burn wherein Whannell embraces the fact that the movie’s title tells us what’s going on. There’s no senseless preliminary guessing about demons or ghosts. Moss (an Ellen Ripley-caliber heroine) is quick to realize that this ostensible haunting is actually her abuser, who’s found a way to turn himself invisible—the focus, then, is how and why he did it, and how to put an end to things.

Whannell makes brilliant use of empty space on the screen. A flat shot of an empty kitchen becomes this agitated Where’s Waldo-type display over which the viewer’s eyes are darting here and there to see some trace of presence: is the curtain flinching, did the silverware move, was the cabinet already open?

The bigger-picture delight of Invisible Man is that it shows the top form of a director who, like Jordan Peele (the auteur behind Get Out and Us) or James Wan (The Conjuring, as well as its generally superior but climactically-batshit sequel), is taking the horror genre seriously as a medium that prizes entertainment, above all else, while at the same time embracing its usefulness as a smart and unpretentious battleground for introspection and reflection. A display case for style and craft.

The horror genre, forever a part of that same window-boarded and weedy-lawned cinematic ghetto as sci-fi and fantasy, has and will always ring a bell with the dispossessed who—especially as teenagers—find something chummy and relatable in such villainous outsiders as Universal Studios’ ghoulish Rushmore of 1930s monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man, et al) or the 1980s—90s gang of hook-handed and machete-wielding slashers. The nonverbal Leatherface, of Texas, or the hockey-masked Jason of Camp Crystal Lake are iconic enough, sure, but readers of such genre rags as Fangoria, or longtime lurkers of horror movie forums, will find among its followers a special reverence for the charismatic villains, the vulgar clever swaggy ones, like the pun-obsessed Freddy Krueger, or the bondage bard Pinhead, or the tall, sultry, pimp-coated Candyman. The most beloved monsters have always been those who could express themselves. The outsiders who spoke to (and, perhaps catering to a revenge fantasy, punished) the average joes who ostracized them.

The artists who crafted these movies are often relegated, in their later year, to a life of full-time convention circuitry where, in the ballroom of some or other Florida hotel (whose windows all somehow look down on the same barren swaths of pavement and highway), they wear t-shirts and jeans and sit on panels before an audience of thirty people to tell old stories from the set. Their job now is to interact with fans, to sign things and pose for photos, to hold the company, each weekend, of people who appreciate their work, who keep the candle burning, and surely this is very gratifying for them, in some respects, but what the sight of it also conjures (for some of us) is that vibe of a party whose preparation exceeds its turnout by miles, where the cups are all Dixie and the decorations store-bought, and there’s gonna be so much cola left over that the host’ll be handing out two-liters to guests upon departure. Just something mournful and anticlimactic.

With stylists like Whannell being given free rein by producers like Jason Blum (founder of Blumhouse, a mogul who’s hit oil by giving auteur filmmakers small seven-figure budgets in exchange for total creative freedom), and with such monumental talents as Elizabeth Moss lending their time and name to such projects, it gives horror fans hope that the thing they love will be loved by others, and bonded over, celebrated.

The Invisible Man, the story of an unseen threat that only its target believes in (though even she can’t see it herself), is so unpretentiously simple and well-crafted that, without preaching, it lends itself to different stripes of interpretation and metaphor: illness lurking quietly in the body, a woman’s everyday fear of ubiquitous and covert male predation, the sinister hand of a resourceful tyrant committing lots of technological chicanery.

It is, after all, an election year, and that’s a pretty ripe time to talk about being invisible.

—Alex Sorondo is a writer and film critic living in Miami and the host of the Thousand Movie Project. His fiction has been published in First Inkling Magazine and Jai-Alai Magazine.