Genre: Horror
Premise: After her abusive boyfriend commits suicide, a woman begins to think he’s found a way to haunt her from the grave.
About: Leigh Whannell directed a cool little sci-fi movie that nobody saw called “Upgrade.” Jason Blum was impressed enough with the result that he gave him this film, a new take on Universal’s monsterverse character, the Invisible Man. The film beat out expectations this weekend, taking in a “monster” 29 million bucks. The film is also getting very high praise from critics, snatching up a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Oh to be Jason Blum. One weekend, you’re dodging calls after Fantasy Island tanks, and a brief month later you’re back on top of Hollywood again.
Writer: Leigh Whannell (based on the novel by H.G. Wells)
Details: 2 hours long
You’ve been invisibly penetrated with hyperbole everywhere you turn.
“Elizabeth Moss in the greatest female role in a decade.” “Horror will never be the same after The Invisible Man.” “Is The Invisible Man a modern masterpiece?”
You guys come to this site because I’m not in the pockets of the studios. I don’t have anyone to answer to. In an increasingly “my team vs. your team” business, I’m one of the last reviewers who can look at a movie objectively and tell you whether it’s good or bad.
So is The Invisible Man good?
The answer is: !!!
You like that? I made the answer invisible. If you want the uninvisible answer, you’ll have to get through the plot summary.
The Invisible Man starts with our heroine, Cecilia, escaping a big rich Tony Stark like home on the bluffs of an ocean. She dashes for a remote road where she’s scheduled her sister to pick her up and whisk her off to freedom. Just before they leave, Cecilia’s scientist boyfriend, Adrian, crashes into the car window screaming at Cecilia. They drive off and we realize that Cecilia has just escaped from a living nightmare of a relationship.
Two weeks later we catch up with Cecilia at her African-American friend, James’, home. James lives with his daughter, Sydney, and are acting as a hideout home since Adrian doesn’t know that Cecilia knows them. But that turns out to be a moot point because a few days later, Cecilia gets the news that Adrian committed suicide. She’ll never have to deal with him again.
At least that’s what she thought. Cecilia begins to see and hear strange things in the home, like when she drags a blanket along the floor only to have it stop mid-stride. She looks down to see what appears to be a footprint holding the blanket in place. After several of these unexplainable moments occur, Cecilia believes that Adrian has found a way to cheat death and is now haunting her. Unfortunately, when she shares her opinion with James, he kiiiiiin-da thinks she’s losing it.
When Cecilia receives a large sum of money in Adrian’s will, she suspects it’s another form of control. And Adrian’s creepy brother, Tom, is doing nothing to dispel that notion. When Cecilia’s sister gets e-mails that Cecilia never sent telling her she hopes she dies and Cecilia gets blamed when Sydney gets punched out of nowhere, Cecilia realizes what’s happening. Adrian is slowly and meticulously driving her insane. The question is, how is he doing this? And can Cecilia stop it?
I posed the question before the plot summary? Does this movie live up to the hype?
The answer, without question, is yes!!!
There’s a whole lot of good going on here, specifically on the screenwriting front. Whannell makes a lot of great choices that elevate this beyond typical horror fare.
Let’s take the opening scene. I always tell you guys you gotta have a great opening scene that pulls the reader in. This movie has that. Cecilia is trying to leave Adrian and must do so at 5 in the morning in this big empty echo-y house without making any noise. It’s a very tense scene. But the reason I liked it is because it wasn’t the typical teaser scene I see most writers write.
Most writers either do the flash-forward thing to get a cheap scare in, before writing, “2 weeks earlier.” And jumping back in time to before everything that led to that moment happened. It’s so lazy and overdone. I love when a writer can give us a tense teaser that organically fits into the beginning of the movie’s timeframe. All Cecilia is doing here is leaving a house. And yet it’s one of the best scenes in the film.
The moment I knew this movie was going to be good happened during this sequence. The house has a complex security system. She needs to turn the security off in order to escape without any alarms going off. Now we could’ve easily had her covertly snag Adrian’s laptop right there in the adjacent room and turn off the security system that way.
But here’s what Wahnnell does instead. He has Cecilia go downstairs into Adrian’s “Iron Man” like lab and access the security system from a computer in that room. Why am I telling you this? Because good screenwriters look to achieve multiple objectives in a scene. We needed to explain to the audience that Adrian was a high-level scientist. One look at this lab and we now know that. So by accessing the computer in this lab as opposed to upstairs, allows us to multitask. We’re giving the reader more info in less time.
Any writer can set up 17 different important story points in 17 different scenes. It’s the good screenwriters who can take 17 things and convey them in 3-4 scenes.
But the biggest achievement of this movie, by far, was its ability to take a premise where the novelty could die off quickly and extend it into an exciting piece of entertainment that lasted two hours.
How did it achieve this?
This is one of the most problematic things I see in contained and horror specs. For example, I read a lot of home invasion screenplays. And, at a certain point, it becomes silly that the bad guy hasn’t killed our good guys yet. The only reason it hasn’t happened is because the writer is pulling out every trick in the book to try and extend the story out for a full feature-length running time.
It took me a minute to figure out how Invisible Man wasn’t suffering from that. But then it hit me like a bolt of lightning.
Adrian wasn’t trying to kill Cecilia. He was trying to drive her insane.
Note the difference. If all he cared about was killing her, he could’ve done that within the first five minutes of entering her friend’s house. Movie over. Therefore, if he didn’t kill her within those five minutes, we, the audience, would know that it’s only because the writer is stalling to draw out the running time.
But if you’re trying to drive someone insane, you do that over time. It’s like a chain where you’re adding one link after another. This character’s motivation is control. He wants to get her into her weakest mental state so he has total control over her. This was the key to this screenplay working. It makes sense that the villain was taking his time.
But even by doing that, the story is still too simple to extend to a full 2 hours. So the writer had to do ONE MORE THING that would justify the length. And that thing is something all screenwriters have to do at least once in their screenplay. We’re all terrified of it. Most of us instead take the safe route. But you need to do this if you’re going to keep the audience interested.
And that’s to create, either at the midpoint or a little after the midpoint, a big moment that the audience never saw coming. (Major Spoiler by the way). That occurs here after Cecilia breaks into Adrian’s home and hides a physical piece of his cloaking technology just as Adrian returns home. Cecilia gets her skeptical sister to meet her at a restaurant and explains to her that Adrian is invisible and she’s got the proof.
Right at that moment, a steak knife lifts all on its own, slits the sister’s throat, and then slams into Cecilia’s hand to make it look like she did it. It’s a completely shocking moment cause we didn’t think the sister was gonna die. And especially not here in this safe public place.
But there’s more going on here than meets the eye. The reason people are afraid to make choices like this is because they’re afraid to deal with the consequences of that choice. If you don’t kill off the sister here, you have a clear path to the climax. She and the sister team up, break back into the house to steal the technology, of course Adrian will be there in his invisible suit and attack them. Will they or won’t they get out alive? Blah blah blah. Cecilia somehow tricks him and kills him. The End.
But when you have your hero murder someone in public, there’s no way out of that. You have to deal with the real world consequences of that action. Cecilia has to get taken to jail. She’s not Sara Connor so it’s not like she’s going to break out of prison. So now you’ve got your hero stuck in a prison with no way out. If I went down that potential road in my head, I would’ve seen a narrative dead end. I just couldn’t see a believable way of getting Cecilia out of prison. She can’t escape herself (without the writer’s help). Everyone saw her murder her sister so a judge isn’t going to release her (unless the writer cheats). And if she does manage to escape, every cop in the city is going to be after her. It almost becomes a different movie that we didn’t pay to see.
But here’s the thing. When you put your hero into tough situations, it forces you to be creative and come up with ideas to get them out. Whannell embraces the setting of the mental holding facility, eventually bringing Adrian there to continue his torture of Cecilia, then using the conflict between those two to cleverly create a break-out situation that was believable.
At that point, I was really impressed with what I was seeing. This is good screenwriting. And it continued to kick butt all the way to the climax.
Finally, Whannell did the right thing when it came to making his “message” movie. HE PUT THE MOVIE FIRST AND THE MESSAGE SECOND. When you put the message first, it’s a commercial for your beliefs. When you put the movie first, it’s a good movie that gets you thinking about the social message later.
Yes, there were a few “message” things that bothered me. For example, no white man comes away unscathed in this film. Even the throwaway job interview character had to make some inappropriate remark about how hot Cecilia looked. As if none of us white dudes are capable of getting through a conversation without being an a-hole. But I didn’t care because Whannell so clearly put the focus on making a great movie first. I mean, this was a high-quality riveting suspenseful screenplay. And Elizabeth Moss does a great job in the role of Cecilia.
In other words, the hype train was right about this one. It’s one of the best movies of the year so far.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your hero is not active, your villain must be EXTREMELY active. Cecilia spends the majority of this movie in rooms thinking she sees things. It’s as passive a character as you can write. If you’re writing this kind of storyline, you MUST make your villain active or else there’s nothing pushing on the narrative. The villain, her boyfriend, is always on the hunt, always planning his next deception. That ACTIVITY keeps the plot moving along.
