(These are two movie reviews cross-posted from my own blog).
The Invisible Man (2020) hooked me from the opening sequence in which Cecilia (Elizabeth Moss) sneaks away from her husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, obviously in terror he’ll wake up and catch her. Once away she builds a new life with her sister (Harriet Dyer) and sister’s family but so many weird things start happening. Work vanishes from her portfolio. Someone drugs her bottled water. When she contacts some of her friends they’ve no interest in talking to her after those awful emails she sent them … which she didn’t write.
What’s going on? Well, Cecilia’s husband is not only a gaslighting abuser, he’s also an optics genius, and he’s figured out a terrifying way to use his expertise …
This shows how much power there is in old tropes when they’re done well. Here, Cecilia’s spouse is a monster even when he’s just human; invisibility simply ramps up his capacity to stalk and hurt her. Lives up to all its good reviews. “The only thing more brilliant than inventing something that turns you invisible is not inventing something but making you believe he did.”
After that success, I couldn’t resist watching the same director’s The Wolf-Man (2025) when I found it streaming on a service I subscribe to. The result is, as they say, 100 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
In the opening, young Blake and his father go hunting in the Oregon woods, meet something not of nature born … and we jump twenty years or so into the future when Blake (Christopher Abbott) is a writer with a charming daughter and a strained marriage. When he gets word his long-vanished father has been declared dead, he suggests a vacation at his dad’s isolated home — the kind of place where there’s nobody around for miles and zero cell-phone reception. And their vehicle crashes driving up there and the local giving them directions gets pulled away by something hairy …
Where The Howling broke fresh ground in werewolf movies, Wolf-Man does nothing fresh; it’s not a good sign that I found myself wanting an explanation of what these things are and where they came from, rather than enjoying them as something new. And where Cecilia’s emotional hell anchored Invisible Man, the character elements in this are half-baked, too vague to give it any depth. Most disappointing. “Sometimes when you’re a daddy, you’re so afraid of your kids getting scared, you become the thing that scares them.”
I missed both of these: the former due to it being released just before Covid (correct?).
The Wolf-Man got a limited release window at my multiplex and I just didn’t catch it in time. Judging from reviews, I felt it was no big loss.
I was made redundant 20 or more months ago, couldn’t afford anything more than cinema membership so no streaming services, and since finding another job I’m happy at present to keep it at that.
I’d agree with those assessments. I saw both of them in the theatre, and I thought The Invisible Man worked way better than The Wolfman; but either way, I’m cracking my Universal Monsters box set.
I was really annoyed that Wolfman tried to make werewolves into a scientific disease.
I didn’t even get that but I was starting to tune out a lot of the film as it continued to bore me.
The Invisible Man was my favorite movie of 2020. It’s a clever, modern spin on the concept and it nails the metaphor. I also love Whannell’s previous movie Upgrade, which is a great sci-fi action thriller that starts off like RoboCop or MANTIS and then turns a little more into body horror.
I think I liked Wolf Man more than most, but I agree it was not as effective. I think it tries to do maybe too much thematically– is this a movie about generation trauma and the scars we pass onto our kids, or is it about watching a relative succumb to disease? It tries to have it both ways, but I don’t think the ending it gives us fits both of those stories.