Review: THE INVISIBLE MAN

Cecilia quietly escapes her abusive husband one night and leaves their designer home through the back way through his bizarre looking laboratory and runs to freedom. Freedom is tough as the PTSD still grips hard, even after news of her tormentor's suicide comes through. He's left her a lot of money with attached legal and sanity clauses. She starts to feel watched in her new home which starts to act like a poltergeist has moved in. No one believes her and she grits her teeth and bears it until the stakes are raised horrifying levels and she has a life or death cause to prove.

Meanwhile, the presence of the thing in her house that follows her everywhere grows nastier with behaviour breaking into some hard physical violence. It's the kind of violence that her ex might well escalate to if he knows that not only can he get away with it but that no one will believe his victim when she talks about it. This tough representation of domestic violence which packs in both physical assault and gaslighting on a massive scale might quickly run its course but Leigh Whannell in his difficult second album keeps the helm steady through surprisingly deep waters. Surprising because as co-creator of the Saws and Conjurings we're more used to him coming up with toy horror movies with stopwatch-timed jump scares and Halloween costume ghosties. This is as deep a plunge into real social issues as you can get before you crash through the mainstream wall and get into Ken Loach starkness. But it's a tautly constructed thriller with a sci-fi garnish that doesn't waste a second of its two hours on screen.

Part of why we don't mind spending the time, apart from the expertly handled action, lives in the casting of Elizabeth Moss in the lead. From the white-knuckled fragility of the survivor of abuse to the incredulity at a life again hit by abuse to the fury she must muster for the pushback, Moss goes through everything she has. Magnetic and powerful she owns her every scene (almost every one in the film). One second act moment is worth a note: she has resolved to believe that her abuser is invisible and in the house and sits, armed at the end of her room. She imagines he is in the doorway and addresses him in tones that she only now, her back literally against the wall, can find. The silent reverse shots of the doorway threaten to reveal something sudden and violent and we get the sense that the strength of her gaze, her words and voice alone are stopping the antagonist who, unable to conceive of them, hasn't planned on them and is surprised into his silence.

I have to note, also, the pleasure of a solid electronics-led score that can turn a scene from safe to weird and lightless in seconds and so dominate that its almost visible. The great bursts of real orchestra at key scenes didn't bother me as it might as this other choice was made and demonstrates the value of choosing a composer and letting them have at it. I'll be noting the future work of Benjamin Wallfish.

Leigh Whannell has done what few do in prising himself from a partner role in self-avowed popcorn cinema into use of the mainstream rules to speak of serious things. It reminds me of how the 2014 horror film It Follows used a trope of old slasher movies (sex=death) to broaden it out into a greater question of shared responsibility. A similar trek has happened here as H.G. Wells's fable of corrupting power has been brought into a tightly framed adaptation of a true life horror that fills the news. Yes, it breaks into battle in the third act - it is and must continue to be a mainstream movie - but along the way we have been shown again that even popcorn can teach us something about our tastes.