In the Flesh: The Invisible Man (Patreon)

It’s the little things that make for good suspense. A shot of an empty doorway lingering just long enough to let the viewer’s expectations about what will or won’t come through it make a full and anxious circuit. A mirror positioned just right to catch the glint of a knife as it’s raised to strike. The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell’s 2020 reimagining of the 1933 James Whale classic, has a competent grasp on these things. It plays its cards close enough to the vest in its first half that the sloppier broadness of its second is more or less excusable. There is an admirable tension to its empty halls and focus on locks and doorknobs, a procedural rigor in its earliest scenes of Cecelia fleeing her boyfriend Adrian which successfully carries it through its less polished sequences.

Beyond its facility in establishing tension, though, the film is solid but unadventurous. Its uninspired soundtrack and foley work holds it back repeatedly, generic “spooky sounds” whispering over otherwise effective sequences, jumbled strings swelling bombastically to oversell its most dramatic moments. Whannell’s direction is solid when the subject matter is empty houses and Elizabeth Moss’s twitchy, hollow-eyed stare, but when the movie cries out for speed and fluidity he remains stiffly formal without apparent benefit. Nor are the film’s sets or costumes, uniformly drab and un-lived in, in harmony with its tone.

The Invisible Man is a good movie held back from greatness by a number of small but significant factors, its cutting subject matter blunted by impersonal design and writing. Domestic violence is a natural subject for the source material’s themes of unaccountable brutality, human isolation, and the male urge to dominate. Moss’s performance, desperate and quivering, makes Whannell’s generic antagonist into a believable avatar of the terror of being stalked and controlled by an intimate partner. Unfortunately, that’s where the film’s insight into what it’s like to be abused ends.