The Invisible Man (4/5 Stars)

The story behind the production of “The Invisible Man” reads like a cautionary tale for a terrible movie. “The Invisible Man” is one of several very old properties from Universal Studios that make up its monster movie franchises. (Others include “Frankenstein”, “Dracula”, and the “Wolfman”). When it appeared that franchises with endless chapters like Marvel, DC Comics, and Star Wars were the future of movie money, Universal was sad to contemplate that it did not have a ready franchise to pour all of its money into. All it had were theses monsters. So it attempted to create an interconnected “Dark Universe”. This led to the Tom Cruise led “The Mummy” flop, after which the “Dark Universe” appeared to be a dead idea. However, for shits and giggles, and because creative directors in movie studies are legendarily averse to new ideas, all the monster movies look like they will be rebooted anyway. “The Invisible Man” is one of those movies. A top-down directive is always a bad reason to make a movie.

The next bad idea for making a movie is to cash in on a political moment, in this case #MeToo. I’ve complained several times now about movies and scenes in movies that seem to exist solely to garner applause for being woke but have little to add to the cinematic experience. (“Game of Thrones”, “Captain Marvel” and my last movie review about “Wendy” come to mind). “The Invisible Man” fits squarely in the definition of a #MeToo movie. I bet the pitch for “The Invisible Man” probably went something like this:

Producer: We want to reboot “The Invisible Man”. The franchise made a lot of money in the past. There is a built-in audience and the horror movies are a safe genre to open in theaters.

Creative Director: I like it!

Producer: But it will be different. We’ll make it a #MeToo movie and market it as such. It’ll start Elizabeth Moss, an actress perpetually put upon by mean men in successful series like “Mad Men” and “The Handmaid’s Tale”.

Creative Director: Green Light! Is there a script?

Producer: I’ll get the monkeys to start typing it right away!

Well, sometimes even the worst ideas can turn out all right. I am happy to report that “The Invisible Man” is a hell of a movie. It well-directed, brilliantly acted, and is scary. I never saw the original movie, but I did see Kevin Bacon’s “Hollow Man”. This movie is much better and scarier than “Hollow Man” and I expect better and scarier than the original movie franchise. Credit for this is heavily dependent on the #MeToo premise. Movies in the past about invisible men, at least “Hollow Man”, told the story from the man’s point of view and leaned on the voyeuristic pleasures of being invisible, for example, peeping at naked women. Here, the point of view of the movie switches to that  of a visible woman, Elizabeth Moss playing a recent escapee from an abusive relationship who then becomes suspicious that her controlling ex has turned himself invisible to better continue harassing her. The voyeurism is gone because the audience generally does not know whether it is happening in any given scene. What replaces it is a sense of uneasiness and then terror. The #MeToo premise, far from being its usual anachronistic annoyance, makes the story far more effective as a horror movie.

If this movie has a predecessor in old cinema, I don’t think it would be the original movies, but “Gaslight” from 1944 starring Ingrid Bergman. That movie’s impact wound up verbing the name of the movie in the English lexicon. To “gaslight” is to “manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.” Here, the the invisible man pulls the ultimate gaslight. (Double Feature, anyone?).

The object of the ultimate gaslight, slowly questioning her sanity and being terrified out of her mind is Cecilia Kass, played by Elizabeth Moss. Because there are no other actors in the room, Elizabeth Moss is effectively in a one-woman-show. It is the sort of performance that would garner an easy Oscar nomination if it weren’t in the horror genre. She is perfectly cast in this movie for the reasons outlined along with her preternatural ability to bring a character through the gamut of all the emotions in the right order. She is helped by a wise script that knows that a woman does not need to win every scene in order for the movie to be considered feminist. To understand why this character is interesting and Captain Marvel is not, is to understand what makes characters interesting in general, a standard which applies equally to both the sexes.

“The Invisible Man” was written and directed by Leigh Whannel, who was awful person that wrote the first three “Saw” movies and helped provoke a decade of disgusting torture porn. Only within the last six years, has the horror genre entered a mini renaissance of talented writers and directors like Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Jennifer Kent whose movies are actually scary, not simply exercises in cruelty. “The Invisible Man” belongs in this mini-renaissance. It seems Leigh Whannel has learned something about making movies in the last few years. I suppose there is hope for every single last one of us.

The One I Love (4/5 Stars)

It is impossible to write about this movie without revealing the twist so hinted and hyped in the online movie trailers. This is because the twist is revealed in the first twenty minutes of the movie. So it's not so much of a twist as it is a premise. I figure that makes it fair game in my blog. The premise of the movie is such: A couple, Ethan and Sophie (played by Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss) are seeing a marriage counselor (played by Ted Danson). After a few sessions that do not seem to break new grounds of understanding between the couple, the counselor suggests a weekend trip to a retreat.

The retreat is a villa in an orange grove. There is a swimming pool and a guesthouse. The guesthouse already has people in it. Specifically the people in the guesthouse are Ethan and Sophie. For clarity’s sake, let us refer to them as Fake Ethan and Fake Sophie. They look, talk, and sort of act like the real Ethan and Sophie. But they only show up in the house when only one of either Ethan or Sophie steps inside. So if Real Ethan is inside, Fake Sophie shows up. If Real Sophie is inside, Fake Ethan shows up.

Who are these Twilight Zone people? That is actually up to interpretation, as the movie does not fully explain how they are formed or what their purpose is or even if they can be entirely trusted with the information they supply about themselves. What makes them interesting is that Fake Ethan seems to be a more fun, more exciting, more laid back version of Real Ethan. Fake Sophie pins her hair back and would rather not argue, two things that Real Sophie does not do.

This movie, directed by Charlie McDowell and written by Justin Lader, is what I would call a five star three star movie. It is done perfectly but within the scope of a very small movie. Almost the entirety of the movie takes place within the confines of this one retreat location. There are basically only two actors (Duplass and Moss play themselves twice over) and the action in the story is talking: Lots of talking about people and relationships. This is done very well. It is not entirely an easy thing to keep a story moving along smoothly and unpredictably when the budget and locations and characters are confined as such. I give kudos to newcomers McDowell and Lader on their very good first movie. Mark Duplass is becoming exceptionally good at making and producing these very low budget movies.

I had the pleasure of being apart of the Nitehawk Five Dollar Film Club for this movie and last Saturday we had a fun group discussion about the movie. Before the movie I wondered whether the discussion would go the way of a certain scene in the movie. At one point Real Ethan is obsessed with understanding how the guesthouse works. Real Sophie tells him to stop ruining it. Remember that magic show you took us to and couldn’t stop explaining how all the tricks worked. You completely ruined it! Well, would this Film Club focus the discussion on how the Guest House worked or would it talk about the relationships between the characters (i.e. the marriage counseling)?

Here was my theory on the movie: It is revealed that an incident of infidelity on Real Ethan’s part led to the marriage counseling. The couple cannot get past it. Fake Ethan, the funnier more exciting (more untrustworthy) Ethan, is Ethan in the past at the time he committed the infidelity. Fake Sophie is a version of Real Sophie in the future where in she accepts the fact that Real Ethan has changed from the unfaithful exciting guy into a faithful more boring guy. Who leaves and who stays at the end plays off of these unsaid descriptions and the guesthouse is revealed to actually work as marriage counseling. What makes this movie so strange is that the character arc of growth takes place before the film begins. At the start, Ethan is already changed. What makes this movie stranger is that it takes the guy’s side in the relationship battle. Generally a romantic comedy is about an immature man that matures and the woman just waits out the transformation. Here the problem is that the man has matured but the woman is still in love with the immature version of him. She does not understand that the aspects of Ethan’s personality that made him fun and exciting also made him prone to infidelity. She wants Ethan to be faithful but not boring as well. I can’t tell you how the story ends (another twist!) but whether she makes it out of the retreat is really up for debate. I think it was at least ambiguous.

Nobody at the film club agreed with me. They were overly concerned as to what made the guest house work. Who was Ted Danson? Are they aliens or robots? Did Elisabeth Moss really grow up in Scientology? Et cetera.

I’m being a little mean to the film club. It was a fun discussion, but I feel I did the majority of talking about the relationships during the two hours. Then I had to duck out early because of a basketball game.

Well, what do you think? Go see the movie for yourself and bring along the significant other. There is a lot to talk about here provided you are willing to talk about it. Maybe you should just break up instead.