Sight&Sound - 05.2020

(Jacob Rumans) #1

REVIEWS


72 | Sight&Sound | May 2020

Reviewed by Violet Lucca
The popularisation of the term
‘gaslighting’ – from Patrick
Hamilton’s twice-filmed play
about a man who tries to
convince his wife that she’s
going insane – has greatly opened up public
discourse on abusive relationships. It’s a badly
needed corrective to the notion that abuse is only
physical, but the widespread use of the term has
led to an unfortunate flattening of its meaning (eg,
to describe online disagreements), and to things
like Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man. Like many
contemporary genre films, this one takes an easy-
to-identify metaphor and runs it into the ground.
Adrian, a master of optics, appears to have faked
his own death and then turned invisible (with a
skintight camera-suit) in order to torture his ex-
girlfriend Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss); so successful
is his gaslighting that Cecilia ends up in a high-
security mental institution with greasy hair and
dark circles under her eyes – reduced to a bad
caricature of how ‘crazy’ people supposedly look.
The events leading to the climax are not
terribly scary or surprising. Drawn-out special

effects setpieces attempt to create mood and
ostensibly represent the slow build of abuse: he
causes a grease fire in the kitchen, takes photos
of Cecilia while she’s sleeping, hides his phone
in the attic. Yet many of them feel like padding;
and though the fight choreography is skilful, to
what end? So that domestic violence looks cool?
Whannell’s invisible man never comes close
to the crimes of Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man
(2000), which explores Plato’s parable about the
invisibility-conferring ring of Gyges far more
unsettlingly. And so much screen time is taken
up with creepy pranks that the characters never
really develop personalities. Cecilia has some pithy
banter with her friend’s daughter Sydney (the
always wonderful Storm Reid), but is otherwise
trembling, apologetic, or drugged out of her mind


  • the three emotions Moss is best at playing.
    The film’s denouement is, while not entirely
    believable, somewhat rewarding. But it doesn’t
    create any metaphors for the long, complicated
    road to recovery from abuse, because this is a
    film that has thrown in just the right amount
    of awareness to be recognisable; it’s pre-chewed
    baby-food. Seek catharsis elsewhere.


The Invisible Man
USA/Australia 2020
Director: Leigh Whannell
Certificate 15 124m 18s

San Francisco, present day. Cecilia flees her abusive
boyfriend Adrian, helped by her sister Emily, and stays
with her friend James. Adrian’s brother Tom tells
Cecilia that Adrian has committed suicide and she will
inherit his fortune. Strange things begin happening
at James’s house. Cecilia begins to suspect that
Adrian faked his death and has become invisible to
torture her; she discovers a suit made out of cameras
in his basement and hides it. In a restaurant, the
invisible man cuts Emily’s throat and puts the knife in
Cecilia’s hand. While Cecilia is in a secure treatment
centre, Tom tells her Adrian is still alive, and tries
to blackmail her into having Adrian’s baby. Cecilia
fakes a suicide attempt, then attacks the invisible
man when he intervenes. He escapes and heads to
James’s house to attack him and his daughter. Cecilia
kills the invisible man, who turns out to be Tom:
Adrian is discovered in his house, hog-tied behind a
wall. He tries to make amends with Cecilia. She dons
the invisibility suit she found earlier and kills him.

Produced by
Jason Blum
Kylie Du Fresne
Screenplay/
Screen Story
Leigh Whannell
Director of
Photography
Stefan Duscio
Edited by
Andy Canny
Production Designer
Alex Holmes
Music by/Music
Produced by
Benjamin Wallfisch
Sound Recordist
Paul ‘Salty’ Brincat
Costume Designer
Emily Seresin
Stunt Co-ordinator
Harry Dakanalis
©Universal Studios

Production
Companies
Universal Pictures
presents a
Blumhouse/
Goalpost production
in association
with Nervous Tick
Productions
Executive Producers
Leigh Whannel
Couper Samuelson
Beatriz Sequeira
Jeanette Volturno
Rosemary Blight
Ben Grant

Cast
Elisabeth Moss
Cecilia Kass
Aldis Hodge
James Lanier
Storm Reid

Sydney Lanier
Harriet Dyer
Emily Kass
Michael Dorman
Tom Griffin
Oliver Jackson-
Cohen
Adrian Griffin
Dolby Atmos
In Colour
[2.35:1]
Distributor
Universal Pictures
International
UK & Eire

Unseen enemy: Elisabeth Moss

Credits and Synopsis

Reviewed by Jonathan Romney
In It Must Be Heaven, Palestinian film-maker
Elia Suleiman – as usual playing a version
of himself – visits the office of a Parisian
production company. The French producer


  • played by real-life producer and sales agent
    Vincent Maraval – tells Suleiman that he
    likes his film proposal, but won’t invest in it.
    Although he wouldn’t expect a Palestinian
    film to be didactic or exotic, nevertheless he
    feels that Suleiman’s script isn’t “Palestinian
    enough”: it features episodes that don’t seem
    specifically Palestinian, that “could even take
    place here”. Indeed, much of It Must Be Heaven
    does take place in Paris, as well as New York; in
    his fourth feature, Suleiman has ventured out
    internationally, as if to show that he can escape
    the cultural assumptions that beset Palestinian
    artists. Yet he also shows himself encountering
    something of Palestine wherever he goes.
    In three earlier films, beginning with Chronicle
    of a Disappearance (1996), Suleiman evolved
    a distinctive style, his features comprising
    strings of deadpan vignettes offering more
    or less overt satirical commentary on the
    Palestinian condition, with the director playing
    a version of himself, a rueful observer of the
    tensions, eccentricities and sometimes violence
    around him. The Time That Remains (2009),
    combining modern Palestinian history with an
    autobiographical thread, is his most ambitious
    achievement in this vein. But It Must Be Heaven,
    which takes a gentler, even whimsical approach,
    feels somewhat flat, as if both Suleiman’s quietly
    mordant humour and his persona are played out.
    The opening section sees Suleiman in
    familiar territory, his character – let’s call him
    ‘Elia’ – by turns encountering a neighbour who
    coolly appropriates the Suleiman family lemon
    tree; the neighbour’s elderly father; and two
    Palestinian men confronting a restaurateur
    who has compromised their sister by putting
    wine in a sauce. Tension defines everyday life in
    Nazareth, as in the farcical prelude, with a bishop
    infuriated by finding his procession locked out
    of church. The ambient tension is only fleetingly
    shown in explicit political terms: notably, when
    two Israeli soldiers are seen checking out their
    sunglasses in their car’s mirror, before a young
    woman is revealed blindfolded in the back.
    Disposing of assorted impedimenta from,
    presumably, his dead parents (the film is
    dedicated partly to the memory of Suleiman’s
    parents), Elia visits Paris where he seems
    to find, per the title, a more heavenly state
    of affairs, suggested by a leeringly clichéd
    sequence in which various women of seraphic
    beauty (and one or two men) strut past him
    in slow motion. But even here he finds stress,
    enduring the basilisk glare of a tattooed
    punk (a preposterously cartoonish Grégoire
    Colin). He sees Parisians fight for chairs in
    the Tuileries gardens, and an ominous line of
    tanks roll past the august Place des Victoires
    (for many scenes, Suleiman procured the
    luxury of deserted Paris streets). He also
    suffers the annoyance of a Japanese couple
    mistaking him for their contact ‘Brigitte-san’ – a
    hackneyed riff on cultural misunderstanding
    that is one of the clumsiest things here.


It Must Be Heaven
France/Germany/Turkey/Lebanon/Canada/Qatar
2019
Director: Elia Suleiman

Available
on VOD
platforms
in the UK
Free download pdf