The Invisible Man review – the horror of gaslighting made vivid and gripping

A modern mansion sitting on the edge of a cliff; waves crashing against it in a tumultuous storm; a woman quietly escaping at night while her lover is asleep, as sinister violins play on the soundtrack: all the money in the world couldn’t keep her with him. This is a promising recipe for a classic 1990s erotic thriller, but with one major exception: despite being titled after her assailant, the focus of The Invisible Man and its story of love and money, manipulation and murder, is a woman.

Elisabeth Moss brings her particular ability to combine vulnerability and steely determination (which she showcased at length in The Handmaid’s Tale television series) to play Cecilia, a woman who one night bravely decides to put an end to her extremely toxic relationship with Adrian, a wealthy, brilliant, and controlling optic tech entrepreneur. This opening sequence in which Cecilia tries her best to be the invisible one cleverly sets the tone for the latest film from Australian actor, writer, and director Leigh Whannell (Saw, Upgrade): the drama is all in the minute movements, the deafening silences, and the empty corridors.

For it was in these empty spaces that Adrian used to stand and watch Cecilia’s every move. Now that he’s gone, she can’t help but mistrust each and every deserted room. Unlike so many classic erotic thrillers, the dread and terror here are in line with Blumhouse’s focus on “societal horrors” – nothing too dramatic or unrealistic. Cecilia doesn’t fear being attacked by a bunny-boiling lover or a serial ice pick sex murderer. After Adrian disappears from her life, she is simply traumatised: the source of her fear is at once invisible and omnipresent because it lies in her psyche.

Whannell makes us share in this simultaneously psychological and sensorial experience of constant alertness, using point-of-view cinematography and modulating the film’s soundscape as Cecilia, unable to approach her surroundings rationally, senses a threat where there is none. Staying slightly longer on a shot of a door left ajar doesn’t reveal a hidden clown, Halloween-style, but instead makes evident how menacing the everyday can become for a person who has been traumatised.

Yet soon enough the corners of rooms seem to catch the camera’s attention in a different way. Cecilia’s glances at dark, dead spaces become more pointed, and the camera begins tracing an invisible path. Using the suggestive powers of framing and montage – particularly the circumstantial difference between omniscient and point-of-view shots – Whannell progressively brings his invisible man to life. What begins as a simple expositional shot of Cecilia going about her business alone in a room becomes suddenly voyeuristic when the camera starts following her. No longer a passive spectator to her life, it becomes an active participant in it, recalling the vicious killer-camera used by the Peeping Tom in Michael Powell’s 1960 horror classic.

This calculatedly slow apparition (or revelation, although neither term seems appropriate to discuss someone who can’t be seen) of the invisible harasser merges Cecilia’s trauma – her fear of things hidden in the past – together with her fear of Adrian persecuting her now, a very present danger. To the eyes of everyone around her, these two different kinds of anxiety become one and the same thing: it’s all in her head. Cecilia’s experience of perpetual terror is invalidated by her entire world in an extreme, genre-appropriate and therefore terrifying abstraction of gaslighting. Adrian has managed to hurt Cecilia while rejecting so much responsibility for how she is feeling that he has literally made himself invisible.

If the metaphor isn’t particularly subtle, it is still extremely effective at representing the sense of endless dread that gaslighting and trauma (itself another way by which someone, too caught up in the webs of hurtful memory, is denied her experience of the world as it really is in the present) create in their victims. With his own invisible man film, Hollow Man, Paul Verhoeven made explicit the bad behaviour that one would inevitably engage in if he couldn’t be held accountable for it. The Invisible Man manages to be an even more unpleasant watch – as well as a more interesting one – because it focuses the other side of that dynamic, and understands that having one’s sense of reality refuted by men who try to make their actions disappear is already a common experience.