This Time, <em>The Invisible Man </em>Is Really About a Woman

The movie begins with Cecilia fleeing the high-tech home of her boyfriend, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who has trapped her in an abusive relationship for years. Soon after, it’s reported that Adrian has died by suicide, leaving Cecilia the fortune he amassed as a leader in “the field of optics,” whatever that is. But quickly enough, things start to go bump in the night, and Cecilia realizes that her ex-boyfriend has faked his death and is tormenting her from behind a veil of invisibility. First he pulls spooky pranks in her house, then he starts framing her for acts of brutal violence. Through it all, not even her closest friends or family believe her.

Whannell has been steeped in cutting-edge Hollywood horror for two decades, starting with his innovative scripts for the Saw and Insidious franchises. He’s always had a penchant for plotting that is sensational, grisly, and a little glib, epitomized by the Rube Goldberg torture puzzles at the center of the Saw films. As a director, though, he’s demonstrated some genuine flair, beginning with the third Insidious film (a surprisingly thoughtful prequel), in 2015, and continuing with 2018’s fiendishly fun action-horror Upgrade. So it’s perfectly fitting that Universal has handed him the keys to one of its classic monsters, in a smart shift away from the disastrously ill-fated franchise model behind its expensive 2017 blockbuster The Mummy. The small scale of Whannell’s film makes its bloodiest flourishes and nastiest jumps hit harder.

Prior Invisible Man editions were mostly about the invisible men, from Claude Rains’s mad scientist to Kevin Bacon’s homicidal rapist. This film is really all about Cecilia, and that emotional weight is enough to balance some of Whannell’s sillier narrative instincts. The fundamental creepiness of Adrian’s campaign of gaslighting—slowly convincing everyone around Cecilia that she’s going mad—is grounded in Moss’s terrific performance. She’s an actor accustomed to portraying mental breakdowns (think of her splendid work in Queen of Earth and Her Smell) who uses facial tics and broad grimaces to communicate much deeper pain than any hackneyed horror-movie dialogue could.

Moss’s creativity in depicting fear is assisted by Whannell’s artful flourishes behind the camera. He wrings real terror from the simplest pans across the screen that suggest someone else might be in the room. As Upgrade showed, he also possesses a real gift for action-heavy set pieces. His favorite visual trick keeps the lens tightly focused on a person’s face even as they crumple to the floor, shuddering back and forth under attack. It’s well deployed in The Invisible Man, as Adrian uses his invisibility to take down whole rooms of people.