![]() And the hair and make-up artists, leaving her looking properly sallow and haggard, are contributing something to it as well. This is a story entirely about Cecilia's profound emotional exhaustion over having been manipulated and abused by Adrian, with Moss doing simply phenomenal work of wearing that exhaustion in the shuffling, sagging way she moves through spaces. Every incarnation of The Invisible Man I know, including the unofficial ones, has posited that invisibility is a superpower only desired by people who are untrustworthy bastards at best, outright psychopaths at worst, but this is the first one I can name to shift its focus over to the cost of the invisible man's villainy. It's breathtakingly economical cinematic storytelling: thanks to very little other than the strained expression on Moss's face, the exhausting use of real-time to show every damn little thing Cecilia is doing, and the regular snaps back to Adrian's zonked-out form, the movie, under the guiding hand of director Leigh Whannell, gives us only exactly what we need to know that whoever the sleeping dude is, he must be terrifying for the tired-looking lady to be putting this much stressed-out effort into sneaking away from him.Īnd this is basically the movie. For several excruciatingly tense minutes, we see her slide out of bed, gingerly crisscross a ludicrously splashy modernist mansion to assemble little bits and pieces of what appears to be a very carefully worked-out-escape plan, and do it all in the presence of an oppressively fuzzy silence to go with the oppressively murky lighting. Here, a woman we'll later learn is named Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) is lying in bed, not at all asleep, next to wunderkind optics scientist Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), whom she has drugged. It's a tonally heavy, visually demanding way to start things off, and it immediately kicks off a feeling of weary exhaustion that leads directly into its first proper story sequence. The sequence in question kicks off with a hell of a good credit sequence, in which ocean waves crashing against a rock splash against invisible lettering and and leave the words visible just barely long enough to read them, exacerbated by the very gloomy blue of the pre-dawn lighting. By the end of the film's second minute, I was already holding my breath and cringing at every slight misstep the protagonist made it's a special and good genre film that can get us into that kind of state at any point during its running time, but one that can start us there is doing some miracle shit. This film has the best opening sequence of any horror-thriller in at least the last few years: a ruthless plunge in medias res, where it's entirely clear what's going on without a word needing to be spoken, the stakes seem horrifyingly real, and the likelihood for failure is off the charts. ![]() Wells's 1897 novel nor re-making its own 1933 picture, but relying on brand recognition for a brand-new thing, and would that all brand recognition was handled with this much care and thoughtfulness - is rather damn good in a rather large number of ways, but if I had to pick one single thing to praise about it, I know exactly where I'd start. 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.The new version of The Invisible Man - produced by Blumhouse for Universal Pictures, which isn't really re-adapting H.G. 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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