A Fresh Take on "The Invisible Man"

I saw The Invisible Man. I mean, I didn’t see him. I mean, but I did. Anyway, you know what I’m saying. Originally a novel by H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man is invariably a story about the corruption of power. This years remake of the classic film turns the story on its head. The invisible man is now more devious and sinister and in no way sympathetic. The story now relfects taking back your power over youself.

The Invisible Man (1933)

How Do You Stop a Madman You Can’t See?

Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) arrives at an inn in a remote village, his entire body in bandages. He rents a room to conduct scientific experiments and demands to be left alone. After failing to pay his rent and claiming his work is ruined, the innkeepers demand he leave. When the police come to eject him, he removes his bandages to reveal that his entire body is invisible. He escapes their clutches and wreaks havoc in the village he had been hiding out in. He goes to his colleague, Dr. Arthur Kemp (William Harrigan), and forces him to assist him in his experiments for a cure and his plans of violence. The two men go back to the village to retrieve Jack’s notes and Jack uses the opportunity to assert his existence once more by murdering a police officer in front of a room of people. After learning of his murder, Kemp secretly calls their boss, Dr. Cranley (Henry Travers), for help, then the police. Dr. Cranley is then convinced by his daughter and Jack’s sweetheart, Flora (Gloria Stuart), to immediately go to help him. After arriving, Flora and Jack talk about his crazed plans to rule the world before being interrupted by the arrival of the police. Jack makes his escape but not before telling Kemp that his phone call to the police will cost him his life. Despite the best efforts of the police, Jack slips by them, making a mockery of their officers. Jack stays true to his plan of conquest, throwing people off cliffs, causing a massive train accident and stealing money from a bank. To simultaneously protect Kemp and stop Jack once and for all, the police devise a plan to lure him to the police station using Kemp as bait. The plan fails as Jack sees through it and hijacks the car Kemp was driving to make his escape in before killing him. As the cold sets in, a naked, invisible Jack seeks shelter in a pile of hay inside a nearby barn. Alerted by the barn’s owner, the police set it on fire as a layer of snow begins to coat the ground. Once again, Jack tries to escape but his footprints in the snow give him away and he is shot. Flora and Dr. Cranley come to see Jack in the hospital where he admits his wrongdoings before passing away and becoming visible again in death.

The Dynamic Cast of The Invisible Man

The Invisible Man marked the film debut of Claude Rains. Prior to this, he had only acted on stage which no doubt gave him the ability to be evocative using only his voice. Another notable voice in the film is that of Una O’Connor who played the innkeeper’s wife, Mrs. Hall. The film’s director, James Whale, had such a difficult time stifling his laughter during her scenes of hysterics as he thoroughly enjoyed her sense of humor. The film’s leading actress, however, had a much more difficult time in filming. Gloria Stuart reported to have not enjoyed working alongside Rains, claiming he would push her into the background and hinder her acting ability. Still, through their on-screen chemistry, one would never know about their arguments. A Universal Studios familiar face can be seen in this film. Dwight Frye plays the reporter who suggests putting down tar to spot the invisible man. Frye was also in three other Universal Monster Classics: Dracula as Renfield with his haunting laugh, Frankenstein as Fritz and Bride of Frankenstein as Karl Glutz.

A Doomed Scientist Mad with Power

The difficulty of shooting a film where the main character is invisible must be immense. Though solved with clothing, glasses, and bandages, his face remains entirely covered. Clive Raines’ performance is what bulks up Jack Griffin’s character. First, his body language is telltale of his emotions. When he is angry, his posture is stiff, and his movements are sharp. Conversely, when first speaking with Flora, his shoulders soften and his gestures slow. He also supplements his facial expressions with a distinct and dynamic voice—rife with inflections. Whether he is ranting about dominating the world, or giddy with mischief, it is palpable through his tone of voice.

The antics of Jack start innocently enough. Well, he does push the innkeeper, Mr. Hall, down the stairs after he attempts to eject Jack from the room, but Mrs. Hall’s comedic hysterics help distract the viewer from his head injury. Jack goes off to terrorize the unsuspecting townspeople and makes his escape. This looks lighthearted but his toying with people is a window to a grim world should he be allowed to continue in this manner. The havoc of this small village would be nothing compared to what he could do to a large city.

“Monocane” is the drug Jack took to become invisible. It has a much different effect on everything it was tested on—cloth, a dog, and a human. The fabric was destroyed, and the dog, after turning white, went mad and so it is implied the drug is also making Jack lose his senses. However, it is just as likely that the drug’s only effect was to turn Jack invisible. It is equally likely that his insanity is also due to power. The man was power-hungry before, working as a scientist who felt he was better than his simple job in food preservation. We may just be seeing the results after he finally got a semblance of power

For a moment, it seems that Flora would be able to calm his rage. She’s made out to be a peaceful person and she presents him with reason and understanding to help him. He soon begins to rant about ruling the world with his power and we’re left to wonder: would Flora even be safe from his will if he was left to his own devices?

As for the character of Flora, her scenes are often overtaken by a ridiculous number of flowers. In every scene where she has a closeup, there is almost always a huge vase of flowers that are framed around her face in a most distracting manner. For example, when she and Dr. Kemp discuss Jack’s disappearance in the living room, they stand on opposite sides of a table on which sits an overflowing vase of blossoms. It’s unrealistic and nonessential. Instead of seeing who she is, we only see awkwardly constructed shots seemingly for the sole purpose of making a pun out of her name.

Otherwise, the film is shot rather masterfully when it comes to the character of Jack. There are a few instances of sound issues where it was clear the actor had turned away from the microphone and his voice was lost. Wales achieved the look of Jack being invisible by wrapping Claude Rains in black velvet under the clothes and bandages and shooting him against a backdrop of the same fabric. He then superimposed those shots over the other footage. The effort was practical, and the effect still holds up nearly ninety years later.

Using inventive effects and a vocally emotive Rains, Wales successfully created the compelling character of Jack without ever showing the man’s face. The only time he is seen is on his deathbed where he admits his wrongdoings. The invisible man arrives in the world the same way he departs; leaving footprints in the snow that, like him, will vanish by morning.

---

The Invisible Man (2020)

Taking Stalking to the Extreme

In the dead of night, Cecilia Kass (Elizabeth Moss) drugs and escapes from her abusive boyfriend and renowned optics researcher Adrian Griffin’s (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) house and is picked up by her sister, Emily (Harriet Dyer). Two weeks later, living at her friend James Lanier’s (Aldis Hodge) house with his daughter Sydney (Storm Reid), Cecilia struggles to feel safe. That is until she receives news from Emily that Adrian has apparently killed himself. But just as she begins to feel safe again, she starts feeling as though he is somehow watching her. She confronts Adrian’s brother, Tom (Michael Dorman), about this who persists that his brother is indeed dead. When Cecilia tries to talk to Emily about her worries, Emily shuts her out, claiming to have received a nasty email from Cecilia. At home, Cecilia finds the hurtful email sent from her account, but she never wrote it. Sydney walks in on her crying and is hit by an unseen force. She blames Cecilia for striking her before she and James leave. Cecilia searches the attic to find a missing kitchen knife, a set of keys, her blueprints, and Adrian’s phone. She hears something coming up the ladder and splashes paint down. The paint reveals an invisible human figure. After a struggle with the invisible Adrian, she escapes to Adrian’s abandoned house. She steals his extra invisibility suit and hides it before meeting Emily at a restaurant to tell her of her proof of Adrian’s continued harassment. Mid-sentence, a large knife appears out of nowhere, clearly held by an invisible Adrian and kills Emily before planting itself in Cecilia’s hand. She is taken to a treatment facility where she learns she is pregnant with Adrian’s child. She steals a pen during a meeting with Tom, where she learns he always knew Adrian was alive. That night she stabs Adrian and escapes, but Adrian tells her he is going to kill Sydney. An unseen force attacks Sydney and then James. Cecilia arrives just in time and sprays the invisible man with a fire extinguisher before shooting the now white body. He collapses dead but is revealed to be Tom. News spreads that Adrian has been found kidnapped in his basement. Cecilia tells James it is all a setup and that it was always Adrian. She goes to Adrian’s house one last time to meet him and secretly get him to confess on tape. After he denies it and belittles her, she dons the hidden invisibility suit and makes him slit his own throat. While James knows what she did, he goes along with her plan and rules Adrian’s death a suicide.

From a Universe to Its Own Story

The Invisible Man was originally supposed to be a part of a now canned Dark Universe. The original concept was to create a linked universe through reboots of Universal's classic horror films, but the idea was abandoned after the box office failure of The Mummy (2017). The scene where Cecilia is in the hospital and looks over to see a man covered in bandages except for his eyes is a reference to the original film where Jack Griffin would wrap himself in bandages to be visible. The film’s director, Leigh Whannell, was a writer and actor in the film Saw. As an Easter egg, spray-painted on the outside of the mental institution is Billy the Puppet, the doll the Jigsaw killer uses.

Some Monsters are More Human than We Realize

The Invisible Man is like the ghost story where the ghost is, in fact, a person. Cecilia, an abuse survivor, is not only haunted by the effects of Adrian’s abuse but soon is haunted by his all too real presence. The early ghost-story feel adds to the important portrayal of Cecilia’s abuser as a real monster.

The most frightening thing about the film is not that an invisible person is going around killing people but that Adrian’s abuse towards Cecilia is terrifyingly accurate. The story can be viewed as following the cycle of abuse: the tension building phase, the violence itself, and the honeymoon phase. We are fortunate to see Cecilia break that cycle for good at the end.

I feel it is important to note that the abuser is generally faceless throughout the entire film until the end. When we finally see Adrian, we question if this attractive, well-spoken person could be capable of such terrible things. After all, we never saw him do it ourselves and that is so often the trouble abuse survivors have when telling others. He even goes to great lengths to put on a show of just how much he loves Cecilia, making use of smiles, compliments, and an excessive feast.

Throughout the story, Adrian remains Cecilia’s opposite; she remains courageous while he remains a coward. He is always around her watching, but hiding.

Up until she escapes from the treatment center, he “disappears” and withdraws away, ceasing however he is tormenting Cecilia as soon as Emily and James come around.

I wish we had more time to see the dynamic between Cecilia and Emily. Whannell tries to make the most of the screen time the two characters have together and while I agree not a moment was wasted, I feel that Emily’s death could have been more impactful if there was time to learn about her. We see precious few moments of warmth towards Cecilia and Emily comes across as altogether unlikeable.

One of the least believable things in the film is when Cecilia is sent to the treatment center almost immediately after “killing” her sister. She is still wearing the same clothes so it would have had to have happened within at most a day or two of her arrest. It does not make sense that someone potentially so dangerous would be held in a mental hospital. It seems the reason for this was to try to emphasize how crazy she looks to everyone around her. At this point, Cecilia should in theory think herself to be crazy, but instead she is now steadfast in her belief; she knows more than ever, that it is all Adrian’s doing. Still, it would have been more believable and just as effective if she has simply gone to the county jail.

In addition to unbelievable things, the disappearance and reappearance of the knife that Adrian took do not make sense. It is easy enough to suspend disbelief about a suit that makes its wearer invisible considering Adrian’s job in optics research but what happens to the things he’s holding? If he holds them in his hand, they are still visible as we see when he kills Emily and shoots the security guard. So, when he took the knife from the kitchen in the beginning, what happened to it? Are we to believe the suit has invisibility pockets?

One thing the film gets right about the suit is its look in the rain. Hats off to the visual effects team on this film. While Adrian is in the pouring rain outside the facility, the droplets both trickle down the invisible suit and splash off his head and shoulders. Great puffs of vapor also make the scene more authentic and provide a great callback to the early scene where his breath is seen by Cecilia.

Typically, the monster in a horror film is revealed when it dons its true form. In the film It, Pennywise abandons his human, albeit creepy, clown façade for that of a hideous interdimensional being. In The Thing, the alien disguises itself as any living creature until it is ready to consume another. In the new The Invisible Man, this is reversed. The monster reveals his true self at the end to be no more than terribly human; a human who does not need to conceal himself to be vicious. Cecilia kills him knowing she is saving not only herself but anyone else from falling into his trap again.

---

The Power Hungry Griffins

As the original book itself was made well over a century ago and the film roughly thirty years after, the story of The Invisible Man needed to be updated if it was going to be remade in the present day. Whannell’s version indeed brings the original film to the modern era. In the age of technology, it makes sense that it is now not an unstable chemical making a person invisible but rather light refracted by small cameras. The invisibility is now a device rather than a condition. However, it is just as striking and alarming in appearance as a man covered head to toe in bandages with nothing underneath would be.

Both Griffins are what one would consider mad scientists, but they are different in their approaches. Jack was chaotic. He injected himself with a volatile chemical with no idea what would happen nor plan for undoing it. His ideas of conquest over the world were also premature and unplanned adding to the chaos of his character. On the other hand, Adrian was meticulous. He designed his suit (which also avoided the issue Jack had of never being visible again) and manipulated everyone around him to try to force Cecilia to take him back. His level of foresight far surpassed Jack’s and this made him more capable and more dangerous.

Jack and Adrian both become invisible to gain one thing: power. Adrian wants power over Cecilia, for her to surrender her will to him and live no differently in his home than his dog, Zeus. Jack wants power over the entire world but states he initially did it for Flora. Are these two men not so different? Jack wants everyone to “grovel at his feet” and says, “the world is frightened to death [of him].” But Flora, too, is a part of that world. How long would it be until he felt she didn’t care enough about him or until he felt she didn’t worship him enough? Abuse is about power and it could be only a matter of time before Jack would begin to hold that over Flora.

Additionally, they both intended to make their newfound power known. When Jack hears his misadventure in the town will be deemed a hoax, we can all but imagine the smile on his face as he seizes the opportunity to prove them wrong in the pub. Adrian, too, wants Cecilia to know he is watching. At first, he uses his presence to gaslight her and make her doubt herself. Then he becomes bolder, letting her see his breath outside, stepping on the blanket and finally leaving the pill bottle for her to find. As villains often feel, the fun is in the credit. Both Jack and Adrian could have left their antics as unexplainable phenomena but to know it was committed by a person is more terrifying and adds to their power trip.

There is a dramatic shift between viewpoints from the 1933 version to the 2020 version of The Invisible Man. Wales’ film is positioned in the eyes of the invisible man and how he views the world. This is reflected in the simple, quaint village he terrorizes and how the police are depicted as bumbling rather than astute. He believes he has power and so other people are lesser and clueless as to stop him. Whannell’s take on the story focuses on how the world views the invisible man, or rather how Cecilia does. She is terrorized by an unseen force and loses so much trying to convince people it is her ex-boyfriend. These are two sides to the same coin. Surely, the innkeeper’s wife, Mrs. Hall (Una O’Connor), would view Jack as someone to be feared. It takes pleading with authorities before the town is believed. A huge manhunt is launched to find him, and great lengths are taken by the police to be sure he cannot escape. They know he is dangerous much like how Cecilia knows Adrian is.

In the 1933 version, there is a much more tragic descent of Jack than there is of Adrian. Jack has people who care about him, like Flora and her father, who want him to get better and want to help, and he rejects their outreach for power which leads to his ultimate downfall. On his deathbed, he repents, seeing the error of his ways. With Adrian, he is past the point of reasoning before he ever dons his suit. That reasoning was all that Cecilia probably tried to give him over their three-year relationship and it taught him nothing. He fervently denies ever stalking her at the end and proves in what he says that he would do it all again if it meant keeping her from leaving. In the end, however, both films show what it means to be a monster.

If you or someone you know may be experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or visit their website at thehotline.org. You can also text LOVEIS to 22522. You are not alone.

Edited by Miles Ericksen