travisyoung

As a thriller, The Invisible Man is well intentioned and crafted with moderate competence--a machine designed to take you breathlessly from one scene to the next, your emotions shattered but logic intact. The story is familiar enough, not so much because of it's namesake, the original 1933 The Invisible Man starring Claude Rains, but it's resemblance to 1991's Sleeping with the Enemy.

At least these filmmakers are smart enough to know that if a woman is going to be repeatedly placed in peril, she had better be the heroine and headline the film, even if from the very moment the film begins Cecilia Kass (Elizabeth Moss) is a woman who is determined to no longer be a victim. She escapes her house by the sea and sleeping husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) by running away in the middle of the night. No backstory is offered, we just observe the bleeding edge tech lab as she painstakingly disables each security feature from a single laptop, and from this we surmise that hubby must be a bad dude who is rich and has a playroom less transgressive but sadly more boring than Christian Grey. There are other minute glimpses of his character which suggest his general unfitness for marriage, but these assumptions still do not demystify him in the least. He isn't even a one dimensional character--he truly remains invisible, a cipher whose actions and motivations remain largely unknown for the majority of the film.

Cecilia finds safe haven with a single father cop friend (Aldis Hodge) who happens to have no personality or backstory beyond what I just described. Her new domestic life is portrayed by her being afraid to go outside to get the mail. Sooner rather than later the plot thickens when bad hubby's brother/executor (Michael Dorman) shares the tragic(?) news that hubby is dead, and willed five million to Cecelia paid out a month at a time for about four years.

By now we all know what is going on, even if we don't know how or why, but it is more or less fun to watch. Here these scenes draw from better and more notable films like Poltergeist and The Shining, and ultimately we are the better for it. Cecilia is stalked and seemingly gaslighted through a plot that twists but never quite turns dull.

Elizabeth Moss delivers a tour-de-force performance. If you are like me, it is quite possible you have already witnessed countless hours of her degradation and determined glares directly into the camera on "The Handmaid's Tale". Though the material in that series is arguably better fare in every way, in this film, Moss leads us to scenes which may seem far too contrived to be plausible, however she herself remains totally and utterly believable throughout every frame. Her pitch-perfect performance does not make The Invisible Man a particularly significant film in the scheme of things, but it does establish that she is a film actor of the highest significance because she carries this film completely on her back.

Trust me, if she wasn't in this, it wouldn't be worth watching.