Almost stranger than the phenomenon of being invisible is the fact that, for as long as H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man has been in our consciousness, it has been remade filmically, in essence, all of two times (we’re not counting the Vincent Price-starring sequel, The Invisible Man Returns, the Abbott and Costello version or the “Soviet adaptation”): in 2000 with Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man and now, in 2020, taking an entirely new approach with Elisabeth Moss as lead character Cecilia “Cee” Kass. Like Julia Roberts before her as Laura Burney in 1991’s Sleeping With the Enemy, Cecilia lives with an affluent, sociopathic and narcissistic manipulator, Adrian Griffin–half-named in honor of Wells’ original character (and the other half–his first name–just being garden variety San Francisco douchebag shit).
Of course, “live” is something of a strong word when “imprisoned” might be more accurate. After all, just as any prisoner, Cecilia needs to carefully plot her escape from Adrian’s remote Stinson Beach hideaway (Laura, too, is sequestered in the similarly water-surrounded Cape Cod) if she’s going to make it out without a beatdown. So it is that she must drug Adrian with a supply of her own Diazepam (‘cause you would need a supply to live with this mothafukka as well) in order to buy enough time to turn off the alarm system and flee the scene undetected. There’s just one problem: Zeus. No, not the Greek god, but the adorable dog Cecilia can’t help but turn back for in order to free him as well (all good people are, after all, suckers for canine entreaties). Alas, Zeus triggers the car alarm and it’s off to the races more than ever for Cecilia as she retreats toward the woods in anticipation of her sister, Emily (Harriet Dyer), coming to pick her up. Emily, who is annoyingly cavalier about asking Cecilia what’s going on during this intense moment of urgency–it’s like, “Drive bitch–don’t ask questions!” But she does, stalling on pressing the gas pedal and leaving enough time for Adrian to lurch out of the darkness, punch the window in and put his bloody hand on Cecilia. And yes, that is suddenly when Emily puts together “what’s wrong.”
Hidden away back at her sister’s house, which is, actually, more of her ex-husband’s, James (Aldis Hoddge), and their daughter’s, Sydney (Storm Reid), Cecilia goes into a deep dive of paranoia, refusing to use her phone and covering up the camera lens on her computer, convinced Adrian is spying on her. And yet, when Emily drops in a few weeks later to tell her that Adrian has killed himself, what she feels is not relief so much as suspicion. Further fueled by the fact that his brother/Executor, Tom (Michael Dorman), informs her that Adrian left her a large sum of money, to be distributed monthly in a Trust. Though hesitant to take the cash at first, Cecilia can’t help but see the merit of all it could do, including fund Sydney’s college education at Parsons (because all West Coast girls foolishly want to move to the East Coast).
With the money accepted, Cecilia has an ephemeral moment of celebration before signs of Adrian begin to manifest in unsettling ways. Subtly at first, to make it just questionable enough for her to wonder if she’s going mad, for example: a door left open. Then undeniable, like when Adrian drugs her with too much Diazepam, causing her to pass out at a job interview where he had swiped her “architect’s portfolio” of all its contents. Later, the very bottle she had dropped on the way from escaping his house shows up on the bathroom counter, complete with bloody fingerprint. Even still, no one believes her. She’s told simply not to let Adrian continue to win by “allowing” his ghost to haunt her. Ah, how celestially gaslighting Adrian’s invisibility is, providing him with even more of a superpower than the visibility of his wealth in life–as opposed to his present afterlife, in which Cecilia continues to be the only one who is able to call his bluff; this is, indeed, the precise reason Adrian is so obsessed with her. Must do everything in his endless power to “keep” and control her. Part of that is alienating the few people in her life she has: James, Sydney and Emily. To extract the latter, Adrian writes a harshly worded email from Cecilia’s computer, telling her she never wants to see Emily again, that she feels constantly suffocated by her. To ax the former two, all Adrian needs to do is hit Sydney in the face, making it seem like Cecilia did it. James comes running and removes her from the house, leaving Sydney all alone to face her monster.
At this point, it’s undeniable that the 2020 version of The Invisible Man has little bearing on the original. For in that one, Griffin’s only goal was to wreak havoc via his self-declared “Reign of Terror,” a bid to cause complete and total chaos for the sole reason being: because he could. That’s the power of invisibility, and precisely where H.G. Wells got the kernel for his idea for the story–from Plato’s Republic, in which the folkloric Ring of Gyges leads Glaucon to posit in the second book, “No one would be so steeled against temptation as to abide in the practice of justice, and resolutely abstain from touching the property of his neighbors, when he had it in his power to help himself without fear to anything he pleased in the market, or to go into private houses and have intercourse with whom he would, or to kill and release from prison according to his own pleasure, and in everything else to act among men with the power of a god.” True words, to be sure–except that Adrian only has interest in acting like a god over Cecilia, in a classic version of the master manipulator on steroids.
As such, The Invisible Man is up there with the aforementioned Sleeping With the Enemy and Enough (a Jennifer Lopez movie that actually doesn’t get enough credit, unlike her also non-Oscar nominated turn in Hustlers) in terms of illustrating the fact that, whenever a woman desires escape from an abusive, toxic male, she has to get the job done herself. Because, first and foremost, no one ever believes her when she tells them the extent of just how bad it is. And secondly, the notion of “due process” doesn’t really work for a woman whose clock is ticking not biologically but in terms of how much time she has left to live with an obsessive psychopath chasing after her. Cecilia knows this better than anyone, finally accepting that she must deal with the “matter” of Adrian on her own. And the only way to do that is making him as visible to everyone else as he is to her. For in the end, it is her innate ability to see right through him that makes her (and all women like her) such a threat. Because even when you refuse to believe them, they’ll find a way to make the evidence so glaring you can’t ignore it. It just so happens to be a tragedy that this is still how the world works, ergo lending more credibility than one might initially realize to this narrative. Now if only it was actually written and directed by a woman, instead of Leigh Whannell.
