When it comes to horror thrillers, there are fewer good movies. Because of stylistic limitations, many are vulgar.
But this just-out horror film can play the old setting of "Invisible Man" and play a new flower, which is rare.
Today, let's talk about "The Invisible Man", where is the new, and how it has become a dark horse in the box office reputation of horror films.
This article contains spoilers.
1
"The Invisible Man" is, in a way, a process of "how to escape the control of the perverted husband PUA".
The heroine Cecilia and her husband live in a large house by the sea, and one night they planned to escape, put stability in her husband's water, lifted the alarm system, and sneaked out of the door.
But the husband is crazy, Cecilia just got into her sister's car, the husband rushed to ask the heroine to stay, punched the glass, and ran after the car.
After escaping and hiding in a friend's house, Cecilia still has a serious psychological shadow and does not dare to go out, and even the people who see running by at the door are afraid.
One day her sister came to Cecilia and told her that her husband was dead. Cecilia stopped worrying and gradually returned to normal.
But strangely, not long after receiving the news of her husband's death, Cecilia received another letter.
The letter was a will from her dead husband, leaving her with an inheritance of five million. With this five-million inheritance, Cecilia pays the school fees and buys things for her friends' children, and everything is getting better.
But things weren't that simple, and Cecilia always felt something was wrong. In the seemingly empty room, she felt that someone was watching.
Late at night, the room lights on, footprints appear on sheets; interview prepared portfolios, take them out to find that the works are missing, and faint during the interview.
Sent to the hospital for a check-up, and stabilize the overdose. And the bottle of Stability was lost by her running away from the house that day.
Together, Cecilia understood. The husband did not die, but only faked his death. He is a new star in the field of optics, wearing the invisibility cloak of his own invention, and no one else can see him.
The people around her didn't believe Cecilia, thinking she was crazy, and she had to try to find clues to her husband's existence from the room herself.
It was difficult to force the Invisible Man out by all means, but compared with the advantages and disadvantages, Cecilia was not an opponent at all, and was beaten by the invisible Invisible Man.
If you can't fight it, you can't escape it. Cecilia wanted to escape, but she couldn't even be sure if her husband was around.
The husband intensified, and when Cecilia's restaurant asked for help from her sister, she directly cut the throat with a kitchen knife on the table, and then put the knife in Cecilia's hand.
In full view of everyone, no one believed the Invisible Man set, and Cecilia was directly imprisoned in a mental hospital.
This hand forced the heroine to a desperate situation, and what was even more terrifying was that even so, the invisible man's husband was still silently watching her in an invisible place beside her.
2
"The Invisible Man" is wonderful, inseparable from director Ray Werner. This horror film veteran often collaborated with Wen Ziren to help him write the script.
From "Chainsaw Horror", then "Dead Silence", and then "Latent" both were written by him. The male protagonist of the first part of "Chainsaw Horror" was also starred by him.
Chainsaw Horror
There are not many films he has directed, but none of them are bad. Lurking 3 is mediocre, but Upgrade is a success.
Upgrade
Compared with the hardcore, bloody, violent, and extremely stylized "Upgrade", the invisible man's image level is less intense and distinct, and it is much more restrained.
But it is not that the audiovisual level of "Invisible Man" has no characteristics, on the contrary, due to the particularity of the "Invisible Man" setting, it is not easy to shoot.
The "invisible man" is a person, who has no other supernatural abilities, but can be invisible. Therefore, within a limited scope, we must use everyday objects and elements to create abnormal distortions.
The most suitable thing in the film is the atmosphere, including cecilia escape and other passages, the sound effects and music are very restrained, very quiet, but full of tension, the audience does not dare to breathe.
There are also a large number of empty shots in the film, including empty shots of the heroine's perspective, and lateral movement shots that show the environment when shooting the heroine.
The special mirror can greatly mobilize the audience's sense of tension, and the heroine is as tight, unconsciously and seriously looking at the changes in those ordinary items in the shot.
The heroine Cecilia, played by Elizabeth Moss, also added a lot to the film.
Elizabeth Moss is an American drama star, and the characters in Mad Men and Top of the Enigma Lake are impressive. In recent years, the hit drama "The Handmaid's Tale", she also won the Emmy Award for Best Actress.
The Handmaid's Tale
Her characters in The Handmaid's Tale and The Invisible Man have a strange resemblance, both moving from oppression to rebellion, forming an intertextuality in terms of female power.
In particular, a large part of "The Invisible Man" is an Elizabeth Moss solo play, and she uses few performance traces to perform the character's uneasy emotional state.
The kind of restraint that wants to escape from her husband, but is shrouded in her shadow. From moments of nervousness in body language, to micro-expressions of facial fluttering, it is very in place.
Since the "invisible person" is invisible, she not only has to show an abnormal state, but also has to face the air and perform without a hand to enter the emotions, which is wonderful enough.
3
Speaking of the "Invisible Man" prototype, it was a while ago, it originated from the science fiction novel "The Invisible Man" published by the British novelist Herbert George Wells in 1897.
The setting has been filmed many times, and many works have borrowed this concept, the most representative of which is Paul Verhoeven's "Transparent Man" in 2000.
Transparent Man
The Invisible Man in the original novel was invisible using potions, but the 2020 version of The Invisible Man keeps pace with the times.
The invisible source is the husband of the optical leader, who does not do the right way, invents an optical invisibility suit, and manipulates his wife every day.
This also gave rise to thematic divergence, with the earliest invisible people being the loss of control and self-destruction that technological developments can bring. But the main line of this play is violence and control in intimate relationships.
Although "The Invisible Man" is also a horror and horror, it is not a demon, more like a fable. The "invisible man" is actually a ubiquitous control.
To outsiders, Cecilia's husband is a model husband, rich and handsome, but in fact he has a sick desire to control. Cecilia is often treated with PUA tactics such as suppression, intimidation, and manipulation.
What exactly did the husband do?
He controlled Cecilia's moods and sorrows, what she ate and dressed, and her leaving home was under the control of her husband, and even later she had control over what she said and thought.
The husband tells Cecilia that she will never leave him, that he can find Cecilia wherever she is, so Cecilia is always in a state of uneasiness and tension.
At the same time, the methods of control also include cracking down on social relations that deny Cecilia, sending emails to her sister in her name to break off her friendship, and making Cecilia rebel, torturing her and isolating her.
To all the people Cecilia cared about, her husband would also use tricks to make others think she was crazy until no one believed her.
In this pathological way, the husband attempts to create "I am the only one in the world who knows you" in order to satisfy his desire to monopolize Cecilia.
Real-life emotional relationships and brainwashing PUA, without invisibility cloaks, may not be as extreme. But these ways and means really exist.
"Invisible Man" has story loopholes, such as the character IQ offline from time to time, forcing the story forward. But this is inevitable for horror thriller genre films.
Overall, The Invisible Man is highly complete. Riding on the theme of women's liberation in the new era, it is very practical and revealing in terms of emotional relationships, perverted love and control.
And from the perspective of the film itself, the atmosphere creation and story fluency are the top of the genre, plus a few good small reversals, quite a surprise, worth watching.