Universal’s attempts to create a shared cinematic universe along the lines of Marvel’s sprawling superhero franchise hit the rocks after a series of high profile flops. Dubbed the “Dark Universe” it officially began with Dracula Untold (2014) – though some fans and critics have attempted to shoehorn in the disastrous Van Helsing (2004) and the less obnoxious The Wolf Man (2008) as earlier entries – and came crashing to a halt with the box office failure of The Mummy (2017). Plans for versions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (with Russell Crowe), Frankenstein (with Javier Bardem as the monster), The Invisible Man (with Johnny Depp) and a new version of Bride of Frankenstein to be directed by Bill Condon were all shelved. The franchise’s lead producers, Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan, packed their bags and left and the Dark Universe got darker still when Universal turned out the lights.
Perhaps mindful of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) – which is The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) in all but name – Universal revived the Invisible Man project (future monster-related films would be standalone they assured us) and handed it over to people who actually knew what they were doing, subcontracting Blumhouse Pictures who had Leigh Whannell – co-creator of the Saw and Insidious franchises and who had recently impressed with the science fiction thriller Upgrade (2018) – write and direct a film that took off on an unexpected tangent and showed that there was still something interesting to do with Universal’s stable of classic “monsters” – all it needed was a talented writer/director who was willing to divest the concept of all its baggage and focus in on the small scale and deeply personal.
Cecilia Kass (Elizabeth Moss) finally summons the courage to flee her abusive and controlling relationship with pioneering optics engineer and entrepreneur Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), drugging him and heading for the safety of her sister Emily (Harrier Dyer) and her childhood friend-turned-cop James (Aldis Lodge) and his teenage daughter Sydney (Storm Reid). Initially so traumatised she can barely leave the house, Cecilia starts to rebuild her life when news comes through that Adrian has committed suicide, leaving her $5 million in his will, administered by his lawyer brother, Tom (Michael Dorman). But strange accidents and mishaps start to plague Cecilia, little things at first but becoming ever more serious. She starts to suspect that Adrian is still alive and is using his advanced knowledge of optics to render himself invisible. The vengeful Adrian frames Cecilia for murder but she escapes incarceration in a psychiatric hospital and, as Adrian starts to target her loved ones, prepares for a final confrontation with her abuser.
One of the strengths of Whannell’s clever and witty take on The Invisible Man is that although it doesn’t want for ambition it’s a much much stripped back and smaller-scale production than the bloated, CGI-heavy Marvel-wannabe disasters that had scuppered the Dark Universe. Whannell focuses in on a handful of characters and the threat isn’t some city-spanning potential disaster as in The Mummy but an altogether more personal and intimate one that engages the audience far more than Tom Cruise battling ancient Egyptians in the London Underground. Perhaps Universal felt justified in allowing Whannell free reign to make a film more about surviving domestic abuse than spectacle as the original Invisible Man franchise had been one of their lesser monster strands. After a great first film, the series had become a string of largely unconnected B-movie thrillers before the inevitable Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) brought it to an ignominious end.
Whannell cannily doesn’t fall back on tried and trusted invisibility effects for the first half of the film (there are no cavorting disembodied trousers or cutlery playfully floating around the room) and instead relies of building up a growing sense of dread and paranoia, constantly isolating Cecilia is seemingly empty rooms which we later realise were never as empty as they seem. Whannell often places Moss to the left or right of the screen, leaving seemingly innocuous kitchens, office space and living rooms to fill up the rest of the frame, voids that may be hiding who-knows-what. Once we realise what’s going on, we start to become as paranoid as Cecilia – every empty bit of frame suddenly becomes horribly ominous.
Moss is often left to react to these empty spaces and as you’d expect she’s excellent, putting audiences through the same emotional mill as her character and once again proving that no-one expresses pain and torment quite like she does. She gets to flex her physical acting muscles too in the film’ first big set piece which doesn’t occur until we’ve had the emotional screws turned for an hour in a cracking fight with her invisible tormentor in her kitchen that recalls the similarly inventive scraps in Upgrade. Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid and Harriet Dyer deserve some recognition too and the believable relationships between the likeable characters, nicely acted by a fine ensemble cast, only adds to the film’s considerable emotional heft. Oliver Jackson-Cohen is second billed as the appalling Adrian but understandably, apart from a few brief glimpses of him in the opening sequence, he remains off camera until the very end.
Whannell’s experience in the genre is the key to understanding why The Invisible Man succeeded where the bloated blockbusters that preceded it failed. He avoids the nods and winks that you might expect towards the fans (though Adrian’s surname is revealed to be Griffin, tying the film to both H.G. Wells’ novel, though Wells himself goes uncredited, and the scientific dynasty that notionally held together the original Universal films) but is canny enough to play with his audiences expectations. The strange events that start to overtake Cecilia (a breakfast fry-up that mysteriously catches alight, work that disappears from a portfolio when Cecilia goes for a job interview, the discovery of high levels of Diazepam in her blood) are initially framed as possibly supernatural events, slyly suggesting that Cecilia is being haunted by Adrian from beyond the grave. Only later does the more scientific rationale emerge, the film switching abruptly from potential ghost story to hi-tech tale of extreme gaslighting.
Whannell’s use of sound is particularly notable, a nicely ironic touch in a film about visibility (or lack of it). The film’s first seven minutes unfold without any music and it’s another two minutes on top of that before we get any discernible dialogue. Benjamin Wallfisch’s excellent score is used sparingly throughout, the eerie quiet only adding to Cecilias’s sense of loneliness and vulnerability. This is never more skilfully demonstrated than in a creepy trip into the attic in search of a mobile phone which Whannell milks for maximum suspense.
In some respects, the Universal classic monsters of the 30s and 40s were the original “superhero” shared universe, a sort of anti-Marvel Cinematic Universe in which a series of supernaturally gifted or scientifically enhanced characters are introduced in their own standalone films, with sequels following hot on the tail of box office success before they were all brought together in their own crossover films House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). Whether the critical and box office success that The Invisible Man enjoyed (this despite its theatrical run being somewhat curtailed by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic) will lead to a revival of the Dark Universe concept it’s still too early to tell but as of March 2020, a spin-off film, The Invisible Woman (presumably unrelated to the 1940 film of the same name), was in development with Elizabeth Banks set to write, direct and star.
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