Sight&Sound - 05.2020

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