Universal did this by announcing that it would take on a limited approach towards storytelling, calling on past monsters for hire in separate “filmmaker-driven” films as the start of auteurist studio horror films in the haunting genre known as “modern audiences.” It is described as an update of James Whale’s 1933 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel, rather than a faithful one, with Whannell freeing the titular monster from moral ambiguity characteristic with the old Universal antiheroes. Instead, he shifts the narrative onto the object of his attacks thereby contemporizing it to match to modern-day horror narratives where our villain, herein portrayed as an abusive husband who becomes vengeful after being left by his wife.
The woman in danger (Elisabeth Moss) spends most of her time in this film fretting over what she believes is her undead spouse’s plans for vengeance against her. She acts out convincingly the case of a woman habituated to living under abuse and denied voice. In every line delivered during its first half, there is always that anticipation for silence due to faltering—an effect that allows terror rooted within surveillance and invisibility or one being seen but not seeing others. What if they can’t see what could hurt you? Does that mean you are then perceived as dangerous?
In these regards, Whannell’s The Invisible Man contextualizes him within 21st-century studio horror broadly; it also has him portray himself as part of ghostly tales whereby humans’ scientific misconduct substitutes supernatural powers. It is made even more literal by having Adrian Griffin (who bore an original character name and was also called Claude Rains in James Whale’s picture) supposed to be dead; nobody other than his former wife Cecilia (Moss) thinks he never left Earth permanently and continues torturing her continuously. She believes he has faked his death and somehow learned how to make himself the invisible man so that he can haunt her everywhere she goes. The movie, to this end, seizes on the formal implications of that situation, which is why we see the camera looking through an entire room until its emptiness is laid bare – which forces us to question our sanity.
Whannell knows the silliness that lurks behind the idea of seriously imagining a technology capable of turning an individual’s body invisible and he has succeeded in achieving this objective through the climactic action setpieces of his film’s second half. The challenge to demonstrate in an audio-visual medium how much damage can be caused by someone who cannot be seen and is very particular about remaining unheard becomes ingeniously met as Cecilia’s misery continues to get worse. Whannell understands that darkness only scares us because we know that there are potential risks which may exist but are unseen, hence no way of protecting oneself from such attacks.
The different uses of sound in this movie could be compared with those of the 1933 adaptation which was produced around the same time when talkies were introduced into Hollywood. According to Chion (1994) in his book Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, for example, the earlier feature took full advantage its status as a new sound film, playing out empirically between sound and image, magnifying “the problem” of what Braun calls “…a half-embodied voice” for expressing physical presence within the frame. The Invisible man barely speaks here; his materiality is indicated using traces left by his skin (dragging sheets off beds, breath appearing like mist in cold air or leaving marks on chairs). Griffin wants to avoid causing chaos for everyone else; he just does not want anyone except his victim to know that she is being stalked by him even when she is alone so that she feels entirely cut off from others. The different forms of invisibility facilitated by an ingested drug and wearing a suit also suggest something: While 1933 Hollywood had been fascinated by how much a body’s assumed sonic mark could enforce its existence upon it when turned into fantastic power, Hollywood 2020 becomes more invested in how a highly motivated dangerous prey can lose himself inside human-made technical structure permitting him to vanish plain view.
This is an efficient and elegant allegory of the position of women in the wake of the #MeToo movement (and more generally, actresses themselves). In different professional environments but most notably within mainstream media production, ‘believe women’ has become a common slogan these days as it seeks to address a patriarchal culture that denies reports of rape, abuse and harassment. This is an unfolding crisis at every level of Hollywood’s working class labor market. (A totally different generic take on this dynamic is offered by Kitty Green’s recent narrative feature The Assistant which uses the pacing and style of a slow-burn psychological thriller to articulate the crimes committed by a more familiar kind of monster.) This villain in The Invisible Man is described as being well known “in the field of optics”—a word choice that underscores its all-too-appropriate metaphoric frame: an invisible serial rapist as someone who can exercise horrible influence through impunity.
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