Man. In came a violent, low-budget Blumhouse-
produced re-imagining from the co-creator of
the “Saw” franchise. The bandages and shades,
needless to say, didn’t make the cut.
Instead, this “Invisible Man” has shifted its
focus from Wells’ optics scientist to a woman,
Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss), running from him
and fleeing a toxic relationship. In the movie’s
breathtaking opening (one seemingly modeled
after “Sleeping With the Enemy”), she carefully,
with disgust on her face, lifts the hand draped
over her in bed. With barely hushed panic, she
makes her well-planned nighttime escape
from his bleakly modernist seaside house while
the sound of waves pummeling the northern
California shoreline thunder around her.
The man, Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), we
don’t quiet see. But we immediately get a vivid
sense of his abusiveness from Cecilia’s white-
knuckle fear. She takes refuge in the home
of a childhood friend, a police officer (Aldis
Hodge), and his daughter (Storm Reid). There,
she trembles with dread at the thought of
Adrian coming for her. Her intense paranoia is
only momentarily relieved when she gets news
that he has killed himself. But when she begins
to sense an eerie presence, and notice things
like an unexplained imprint on the rug, Cecilia
knows that Adrian — “a world-leader in optics”
capable of extreme discoveries — is still with
her. “He’s not dead,” she says. “I just can’t see him.”
A pervasive terror cloaks the movie. It’s elevated
considerably by Moss, an actress thoroughly
at home in the most prickly, anxious and
unsettling situations. Her Cecilia is a portrait of
a woman desperately clawing for her freedom,
but haunted by the specter, real or imagined, of