THE INVISIBLE MAN (US/Australia - 2020) Written and directed by Leigh Whannell. Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Harriet Dyer, Michael Dorman, Benedict Hardie, Nicholas Hope, Renee Lim, Nash Edgerton. (R, 124 mins) With Universal finally--for now--throwing in the towel with their attempted Marvelization of the studio's classic monsters in the ill-conceived "Dark Universe" that they tried their damnedest to make a thing (have you met anyone who actually likes the Tom Cruise MUMMY?), THE INVISIBLE MAN serves as a stand-alone, modern-day re-imagining from writer/director Leigh Whannell. Best known for co-writing and starring in the first SAW and then the INSIDIOUS franchise, Whannell seems to be sticking with relatively smaller-scale genre fare while his former creative partner James Wan has helmed the CONJURING films and blockbusters like FURIOUS 7 and AQUAMAN. Whannell's 2018 sci-fi actioner UPGRADE was an entertaining, imaginative, low-cost B-movie that should've gotten a lot more attention than it did, but with the Blumhouse production THE INVISIBLE MAN--budgeted at less than $10 million, or pocket change by today's standards--he establishes himself as a serious horror craftsman, very conservatively doling out the kind of jump scares that INSIDIOUS helped make overly familiar and instead using the Invisible Man trope in service of an intense, harrowing chronicle of abuse and gaslighting. And it's all in the guise of a nail-biting, pulse-pounding fright flick that's also--somehow, given the potentially triggering subject matter--a cathartic crowd-pleaser at the same time.
As effectively as Whannell uses uncomfortable silences in the sound design and makes every bit of empty space in the widescreen framing seem ominous and threatening, THE INVISIBLE MAN wouldn't work at all if not for the powerhouse performance by Elisabeth Moss, the latest example in a growing line of stellar work by exemplary actresses (think Toni Collette in HEREDITARY and Florence Pugh in MIDSOMMAR) that will go unrewarded because horror movies just aren't given serious awards consideration. Moss has been putting together an acclaimed body of work going back to AMC's MAD MEN, and more recently on Hulu's THE HANDMAID'S TALE, a memorable supporting turn in US, and the indie drama HER SMELL, and she just knocks it out of the park in THE INVISIBLE MAN. She plays Cecilia Kass, who's introduced pulling off a daring, intricately-planned 3:45 am escape from the oceanside mansion of her wealthy boyfriend Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Adrian is a brilliant, groundbreaking optics scientist, and he's also a manipulative psychopath, a psychologically and physically abusive control freak, and Cecilia has reached her breaking point. She drugs Adrian and still barely manages to escape with her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer) in a waiting car nearby, and she hides out with her old friend, cop James (Aldis Hodge) and his teenage daughter Sydney (Storm Reid). Two weeks go by, and she's afraid to even walk outside for fear that Adrian has found out where she is, until Emily brings tragic, albeit relieving news: Adrian has committed suicide, and his younger brother and attorney Tom (Michael Dorman) informs Cecilia that Adrian has left her $5 million, payable in tax-free monthly installments of $100,000, contingent on her not being arrested for a crime or being declared mentally incompetent.
It seems too good to be true, and because it's a horror movie, it is. Cecilia cautiously begins building a new life and has a strong support system in Emily, James, and Sydney, but little things start happening. A knife disappears, a door is left ajar, a skillet catches fire when the burner is cranked too high. She starts feeling like someone is in the room with her even when she's alone. She goes to a job interview and finds her portfolio empty. She passes out and blood work reveals a dangerously high level of Diazepam, which she stopped taking when she lost the prescription bottle during her escape from Adrian's. That missing bottle suddenly turns up on the bathroom sink. Emily cuts off contact with her after receiving a cruel and harshly-worded e-mail that Cecilia swears she never sent. She confronts Tom and accuses him of helping fake Adrian's suicide, and that Adrian's work in optics and physics--possibly having something to do with a strange machine she observed in his high-tech lab during her escape--has resulted in the ability to somehow make himself invisible. Of course, no one believes her and she sounds insane, and she's soon terrifying Sydney to the point where James wants her out of the house. But she's not crazy. She can't prove it, but Adrian is very much alive, and even more of a domineering, narcissistic sociopath than when he was visible, and he's determined to destroy Cecilia's life as revenge for leaving him.
It doesn't quite qualify as a "#MeToo"-ification of H.G. Wells (though R-rated, there is one plot point later on with which a more exploitative film would've taken a much grosser path), but THE INVISIBLE MAN is frequently a very unsettling depiction of the PTSD suffered by abuse victims. Though she's given plenty of opportunities to go full-throttle, Moss often lets her eyes, forever sad and surveying everywhere in almost paralyzed fear that Adrian could be anywhere, speak volumes. Almost everyone knows someone who's been the victim in an abusive situation, and Moss (who, at Whannell's insistence, was asked to go over his script to make whatever tweaks were necessary to avoid any unintentional mansplaining and ensure its accuracy from a woman's perspective) absolutely nails the trauma, the terror, and the rage. It's a remarkable performance in a very well-done genre outing, albeit one where the plot holes do get a little too big to ignore. But the film is so intense, so good at playing the audience (if you see this in a theater, there's a guaranteed collective gasp at the restaurant scene), and so inspired in the way it shifts into unpredictable directions at which the trailer never even hinted that it's a case where griping about the logic lapses is just petty nit-picking. It is, after all, a movie about an invisible man.
UPGRADE (US/Australia - 2018) Written and directed by Leigh Whannell. Cast: Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson, Melanie Vallejo, Benedict Hardie, Linda Cropper, Richard Cawthorne, Christopher Kirby, Clayton Jacobson, voice of Simon Maiden. (R, 100 mins)
An imaginative take on the revenge thriller, the high-concept UPGRADE wouldn't have been out of place as Vidmark Entertainment title in the new release section of your favorite video store in the early '90s. That's meant as a compliment, as it's a fast, mean, and cynical indictment of our reliance on technology that has a message but doesn't take itself so seriously that it forgets to be entertaining. In other words, it's a B-movie like they used to make. In a vaguely-defined near-future America with self-driving cars, omnipresent surveillance drones, and MINORITY REPORT touch-screens everywhere, proudly blue-collar and stubbornly Luddite mechanic Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) is a man out of his time. He hates technology, still listens to music on vinyl, drinks Budweiser, and refuses to use his wife Asha's (Melanie Vallejo) self-driving, autonomous car. Asha's the primary breadwinner, working for a robotics corporation called Cobalt, but Grey makes some decent money restoring old muscle cars for rich guys with money to burn. Asha is stunned to learn that Grey's latest client is Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), a brilliant and reclusive young tech mogul who owns Vessel, a groundbreaking company whose achievements have far surpassed Cobalt. On the way home from delivering Keen's car, Asha's malfunctions and goes offline, speeding up and crashing until a rescue unit arrives and proceeds to kill Asha and shoot Grey in the back of the neck, leaving him to die.
Awakening after a three-month coma to find he's paralyzed from the neck down, Grey has no interest in being taken care of by machines or his mother (Linda Cropper), which leads to an attempted painkiller overdose. While recovering in the hospital, Grey is visited by Eron, who offers to make him a test subject in a secret experiment involving "STEM," his latest biomechanical creation. It's a small, insect-sized implant that will fuse with his spine and serve as the missing "bridge" between his brain and body, allowing him to walk again. The catch: it's still experimental and top-secret, so when he's not alone, he still has to be in the wheelchair and appear to be quadriplegic to everyone, including his mother. Once he learns to walk again, Grey is in for another surprise: STEM is alive, existing as a HAL 9000-like voice (Simon Maiden) that only he can hear. STEM not only assists in Grey's mobility but also with the investigation into Asha's murder, which is at a dead-end with Cortez (Betty Gabriel), the lone wolf cop who caught the case. Watching drone surveillance footage through Grey's eyes, STEM is able to identify one of the killers--all of whom have surgically implanted shotguns embedded in their arms that fire out of the palms of their hands--and directs Grey to his address. A scuffle ensues and Grey is getting his ass handed to him, at which point STEM informs him "I need your permission to operate independently." With permission granted, Grey becomes a one-man killing machine, reborn and unstoppable thanks to STEM's all-knowing, all-seeing technology, especially once STEM warns him that a concerned Eron is trying to take him offline and has him visit a hacker with specific directions to override its creator's capabilities.
Written and directed by SAW and INSIDIOUS writer/co-star Leigh Whannell, UPGRADE has its share of jokey, crowd-pleasing moments, with some insanely over-the-top splatter kills and one very nicely-done car chase. Whannell's script does let Grey's transformation from "everyman who can't fathom ending someone's life" to "wisecracking vigilante smartass" happen a little too abruptly, as he's only offing the second guy responsible for Asha's death before he's already dropping bon mots like "Don't you know I'm a fucking ninja?" The technophobic chip on Grey's shoulder is a little overplayed early on, with Whannell working too hard to present him as a working class hero of the future, but the message gets less ham-fisted the more UPGRADE goes on, with a pair of late revelations and an unexpected ending that's downbeat enough that you have to wonder if Whannell had to fight to keep it. It's a potentially star-making role for Marshall-Green (PROMETHEUS, THE INVITATION), whose performance is both gritty and funny, whether he's interacting with the voice of STEM to create a back-and-forth buddy movie that exists only in his head, or in some of his inspired, Buster Keaton-like physical acting when Grey cedes control of himself to STEM, pulling off the effect that his entire body is a puppet on a hardwired string. And after making a memorable impression in the second and best PURGE installment, her unforgettable work as Georgina in GET OUT, and with her tough, incredulous Cortez here, it's time for Gabriel to be rewarded with her own movie. Goofy, fast-moving, and ultraviolent, UPGRADE pulls off a lot with a pretty low budget. There's definitely some word-of-mouth sleeper hit potential, not to mention a very probable cult following once it hits streaming and then lands in cable rotation for the next few decades.
Directed by James Wan. Written by Leigh Whannell. Cast: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Barbara Hershey, Lin Shaye, Steve Coulter, Ty Simpkins, Leigh Whannell, Angus Sampson, Jocelin Donahue, Andrew Astor, Michael Beach, Tom Fitzpatrick, Danielle Bisutti. (PG-13, 105 mins)
Two months after the very effective, old-school fright flick THE CONJURING, director James Wan (SAW) has a sequel to his 2011 hit INSIDIOUS in theaters. INSIDIOUS was 2/3 of a terrific horror film that collapsed in the last third, and this follow-up is dead in the water from the start. Everything Wan did right in INSIDIOUS and THE CONJURING goes wrong here as he and screenwriter/co-star Leigh Whannell really stretch to expand a story that ran out of gas before the first film was even finished. Weaving a complicated backstory into the first film--and pulling a page from the SAW sequels' playbook as some events here take place at the same time as the first INSIDIOUS--while relying on the same scares that were once fresh but now seem played out (look around the periphery of several scenes and you expect to find a ghostly figure lurking somewhere), everything about CHAPTER 2 feels repetitive, uninspired, and at times, downright desperate.
Picking up right where the first film left off, medium Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) is dead, with Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson, also in THE CONJURING) under suspicion after venturing into the purgatorial ghost world known as The Further to rescue his son Dalton (Ty Simpkins), who was abducted by spirits that have followed Josh since he was a child. Moving in with Josh's mother Lorraine (Barbara Hershey), Josh and wife Renai (Rose Byrne) soon find themselves under siege once more by malevolent spirits. This time, Josh really doesn't seem like Josh, and it doesn't take long for Renai to realize that another spirit is lurking inside him. Enter Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), Elise's wacky ghostbusting sidekicks, who team up with Carl (Steve Coulter), an old associate of Elise's, and figure out that Josh is possessed by the ghost of Parker Crane (Tom Fitzpatrick), who was a serial killer known as the Bride in Black, driven to kill by the memories of childhood abuse at the hands of his wicked mother (Danielle Bisutti).
The confusing storyline doesn't make much sense, especially when Josh, trapped in The Further by Crane's spirit, starts interacting with himself and Renai in events from the first film. He also travels back to 1986 to converse with himself as a child. These "Further" rules and abilities seem arbitrary and made up as they go along, and do nothing to enhance the experience of the first film, which, while not following through all the way to the end, still functioned nicely on its own. No, everything here seems like a cash-in. Most sequels are unnecessary anyway, but this one feels especially so and is doubly disappointing considering how good THE CONJURING was. Unlike its predecessor, INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2 is boring and illogical, the jump-scares no longer work, and the "possessed by a serial killer" angle feels stale and seems to exist only to give Wilson a chance to act like Jack Nicholson in THE SHINING. It's a huge step back for Wan, who really impressed with THE CONJURING, and of course, the door is left open for a third INSIDIOUS, which has already been announced. I think I've seen enough.
