As we watch Cee try desperately to pack everything she needs up, the camera pans to a hallway. It introduces the first idea of the camera being our unflinching narrator, establishing what I might call the signature shot of The Invisible Man: Pan To Nothing, Pan Back. The introductory sequence, a gripping showpiece of quiet suspense, heroic ingenuity, and defining of stakes regarding our villain, finds Cee attempting to escape the literal clutches of Griffin and his sleek, isolated compound. ![]() If, while watching this film, you think to yourself, "That's unfair!" about a situation Cee is put in, it's because Whannell and Duscio have sharpened this visual vocabulary to an inhumanely human level. And oftentimes, the camera will exist liminally within these two points of views, putting both Cee and us always on a razor's edge. Sometimes it represents an unknown, uncaring, malevolent "visual narrator," eager to rub in our faces how both alone and non-alone Cee is. Sometimes it represents Griffin's point of view. Together, these two turn their camera into an omniscient, point-of-view character within the film. All of these are captured disquietingly and immersively by Whannell and his DP Stefan Duscio, who also lensed Whannell's previous genre masterpiece Upgrade. The rest of the film's engines of terror alternate between quiet, paranoid, anxiety-inducing fakeouts (is an invisible man stalking me?) and increasingly visceral moments of blunt trauma (yes, an invisible man is stalking me). Or did he? Is he, in fact, putting his research to use, terrorizing and trying to control Cee without being seen? When Cee finally escapes from Griffin, she later finds out he committed suicide. Cecilia Kass (nicknamed Cee, as in "see"), was trapped in a controlling, abusive relationship with the powerful and manipulating scientist known as Adrian Griffin (his field of science? Optics). Our hero, whom we want desperately to succeed, is his victim, played to perfection by Elisabeth Moss. His invisible man, as played with single-minded intensity and ickiness by Oliver Jackson-Cohen, is purely our villain. Not so with Leigh Whannell's prescient, incendiary take. He's a genius tortured by his monstrosity, a figure coded as a villain we are challenged to identify with. Most screen depictions of The Man Whomst Is Invisible involve him as our sympathetic antihero - think the iconography of "bandages, sunglasses, hat, and coat," as established by James Whale's 1933 classic. But in all my years of watching and loving horror cinema, I'm not sure I've ever seen "the camera" weaponized in such simple, dread-inducing, and horrifyingly satisfying ways as in 2020's The Invisible Man. And the found footage subgenre of horror makes this technique a fundamental building block. John Carpenter's Halloween of course opens with one of the great and most influential first-person genre tracking shots of all time. Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, released in 1960, features a serial killer who films his crimes with a camera, and Powell often switches to his real-time captured footage. Horror film cinematography using first-person vantage points to align with either its heroes or (more often) its villains is nothing new. But that he would leave me a sign so that I’d know he was there." That he would walk right up to me and I wouldn’t be able to see him. And without me saying a single word, he said that I could never leave him. I was planning the whole thing in my mind. The original The Invisible Man from 1933 is still a classic and an absolute marvel of its time, but it just doesn’t create the same feeling of constant dread that’s present here."One night, I was sitting, and I was thinking about how to leave Adrian. ![]() It creates severe tension and anxiety right from the start where characters never feel safe and it’s for this level of uneasiness that Whannell’s film takes the top spot. The Invisible Man is fantastic when it comes to the special effects, performances, and the score, but beyond everything else this film is just scary. Whannell takes many liberties with the source material, like making the invisibility be a suit that can be taken on and off at will, rather than a permanent curse. The most effective thing about Whannell’s movie is that it’s really a story about toxic relationships and emotional abuse that gets filtered through the old Invisible Man idea. ![]() It may seem trendy to list Leigh Whannell’s most recent take on the Invisible Man as its best adaptation, but the director has truly crafted a powerful, unforgettable piece of horror.
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