Leigh Whannell’s latest reinterpretation of The Invisible Man is now available to rent at home during this time of COVID-19 shutdown across the country, earning a $124 million worldwide box office, a remarkable achievement given the film’s $7 million budget.
The film takes the most basic concept from H.G. Wells’ classic novel, while dispatching with the specifics of the source material. It bears almost no relation to the original aside from the fact that it is about a man who can make himself invisible.
Elisabeth Moss plays Cecilia, a woman in an abusive relationship her wealthy optics scientist husband, Adrian. She escapes from their contemporary modern mansion in the San Francisco Bay Area in the dead of night and two weeks later, Adrian is reported dead by suicide.
When strange things begin happening to Cecilia, she is sure that Adrian’s death was staged and he is able to turn himself invisible to torture her. Cecilia’s family and friends worry about her mental state, fearing she has had a breakdown in light of her traumatic experiences, but we, the audience, know that she is being terrorized.
The conceit here is an excellent update for 2020 audiences: Instead of following the invisible man as past adaptations have done, and as the original novel did, Whannel’s Invisible Man follows a woman the man is haunting.
All incarnations of this story up to this point have been about the power felt by someone who is invisible, and to make him an abusive man who is gaslighting his wife, is a logical next step in the idea.
Whannel’s adaptation reminded me of the 2000 Paul Verhoeven film Hollow Man. Verhoeven’s conceit for his interpretation was similar, but more brutal.
Kevin Bacon plays Sebastian, a military scientist who has invented a serum that turns living beings invisible. He decides to make himself the first human to undergo the procedure, and he immediately starts wielding his newfound power by sexually harassing his female coworkers, including stalking his ex-girlfriend and coworker, Linda (Elisabeth Shue).
As Sebastian lets his newfound power sink into his ego, he becomes overtly violent, killing a dog and raping a woman who lives across the street from him.
The film is unsatisfying, unlike Verhoeven’s truly great satires like RoboCop and Showgirls. (Yes, Showgirls is not Bad, nor is it even So-Bad-It’s-Good; it is simply Good.)
While it takes societal impulses and fears to the extremes like Verhoeven’s previous films also do, Hollow Man is a thought-provoking idea that doesn’t quite work in the execution.
That’s also how I feel about the latest Invisible Man. The film has been fairly well received critically, but I found, that while at times it does feature glimmers of the audacious, it is mostly a boring and surface level examination of what could be a very interesting film.
These updated versions of this tale are similar by the fact that they are interesting failures regarding the notion of masculine power run amok. Hollow Man, however, pushes this experiment further by depicting acts of violence, sexual and otherwise, in a savage, explicit manner.
Verhoeven never shied away from either sex or violence. Indeed, he portrays both in an exaggerated manner that are not to be taken literally, yet feel more authentic to the viewer than they would if depicted in a more naturalistic fashion.
By focusing on the violence instead of the psychological unraveling of the haunted person the way The Invisible Man does, Verhoeven is striking at the heart of American society, particularly the ways in which toxic men are enabled by both the men and women around them.
Changing the word in the title from “Invisible” to “Hollow” is a perfect choice since all of Verhoeven’s American films are about the black nothingness at the center of the country.
In Hollow Man, Linda and Matt (Josh Brolin) lie to the rest of the scientific crew to let Sebastian undergo the invisibility procedure. They haven’t been given clearance, but Sebastian wishes to go through with it anyway, so Linda and Matt make sure that it happens.
The Invisible Man touches on this in a more oblique way, in that Cecilia’s friends and family all think she is insane instead of believing the mounting evidence that Adrian is terrorizing her.
Some of that evidence is not-so-skillfully forgotten to keep this plot thread going, like when Cecilia literally has Adrian’s cell phone that contains photos of her and Storm Reid’s character sleeping, but she shows this to no one.
Hollow Man ’s point works seamlessly as part of the plot — Linda and Matt’s work as part of Sebastian’s team will also be heralded, so they are hitching their wagon to Sebastian’s possibly unhinged star, regardless of what consequences may follow. It is a clear, direct depiction of how this enabling works.
One might argue that the point of The Invisible Man is to explore the psychology of the lead character while Hollow Man is more of a study of how the society allows such a thing to happen.
But never in The Invisible Man do we get an exploration of Cecilia’s state of mind — she simply is positive Adrian is terrorizing her and no one else believes her.
The Invisible Man is actually a movie about a person against the world, dealing with the ramifications of living in a world where men of power can get away with anything.
We watch her mental state unravel, not because of any inner psychological torment, but because of the collective torment society is thrusting upon her. It is a different focus than the analysis of society in Hollow Man, but it is a focus on society, nonetheless.
The Invisible Man and Hollow Man are really interesting sister films, both worth watching for what they are striving to say, even if both fail to say it as well as they could. And with the coronavirus pandemic certain to rage at least through the month of April, there is plenty of time to indulge in both.