The Invisible Man: Fleeing an unseen gaslighter
Australian actor and director Leigh Whannell revives a classic horror character in The Invisible Man.
Leigh Whannell uses a surprisingly domestic image to describe his latest movie. The Invisible Man is a new take on the science fiction horror classic but Whannell talks about wanting the film to be “like a boiling kettle, building and building until it starts to shriek”.
Whannell — Australian actor, writer and director, co-creator of the Saw movies, writer-director of Upgrade — hadn’t originally thought of tackling a movie monster from the 1930s.
“It wasn’t something I’d been thinking about,” he says.
But when he was at a meeting with movie executives from Blumhouse Productions and Universal, and he was asked how he would approach this story, he had no hesitation.
“Off the top of my head I said, ‘I would probably tell the story from the point of view of the victim.’ ” Whannell’s movie isn’t about The Invisible Man; it’s about the woman whose life he tries to destroy.
The Invisible Man, which opens this month, is a contemporary take on HG Wells’s 1897 novel, filmed in 1933 by James Whale (Frankenstein).
Whale used some striking special effects to tell the story of a scientist whose experiments rendered him invisible, and who oscillates between concealing and exploiting his condition. Sometimes he’s bundled up in a hat, mask, coat and gloves, desperate to find a way to reverse what has happened to him; sometimes he makes gleeful, malicious, destructive use of his invisibility, wreaking havoc wherever he goes.
Whannell turns his attention elsewhere. His central figure is a woman caught in an abusive, controlling relationship with a wealthy inventor. The film begins with a tense, protracted scene in which Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) flees from her partner and their life together, making a carefully planned escape from their house in the middle of the night.
With the help of her sister (Harriet Dyer), she goes into hiding. She knows, however, her partner will come after her. News of his apparent suicide still leaves her fearful. She begins to suspect he faked his death, that he’s stalking her and that he has found a way to make himself invisible. It’s not a theory she can persuade anyone to accept and her behaviour looks increasingly unhinged.
Whannell says he felt he had the freedom to “mess with the story a little bit”. The original film is one of a series of movies made by Universal Pictures, alongside Dracula and Frankenstein. Compared with these films and their monsters, Whannell says “the Invisible Man as a character has less of a cultural footprint”. That gave him a bit of leeway “to make it feel grounded and clinical”. In fact, he says: “My role was to make people think this could really happen.”
Myths and legends about the power of invisibility, going all the way back to Plato, tend to show its corrupting effect. Invisibility offers people the opportunity to do whatever they want without fear of being caught.
In a way, Whannell says, the internet offers a kind of invisibility to its users in the form of anonymity. And often “when people have anonymity, they become their worst selves. It unleashes this terrible human id where people say things they’d never say to someone face-to-face … I really do think it has unearthed the deepest darkest thoughts of human beings.”
This, however, is not the issue he’s exploring in The Invisible Man. Cecilia’s husband was already a ruthless, manipulative character obsessed with control. “Invisibility is just one more tool in his belt.” The emphasis is on its impact on another person. As Whannell was working on the film, he began to see resonances. “I find when I’m writing a film I’ll have a story and that’s what makes me excited. Then ideas and themes will start to emerge on their own. That’s what happened here. I started to realise this film was kind of an allegory for someone who wasn’t being believed.”
The Invisible Man can be seen as a story of domestic violence. Emotional abuse isn’t always visible, after all. “If someone is manipulating you, gaslighting you, you don’t even know it’s happening. Someone who is very manipulative can change your reality so you’re begging for forgiveness for something (the other person) did.
“This is something I heard a lot in researching the film, talking to women I knew and women who worked as counsellors to victims of physical and emotional abuse.”
In showing the use that the character made of his invisibility, Whannell deliberately held back on special effects for as long as he could. What he wanted, he says, was to have the audience wondering: “Is he there or not?” He is after tension and anticipation. “An action movie spectacle is all about visuals and a cacophony of sound and image, but horror is almost anti-visual effects. It’s like the less there is in the frame, the more scared you are.”
He even considered the possibility of never “revealing” the Invisible Man. In the end, of course, a loss of control is inevitable, and the horror erupts accordingly. But he wanted to keep the audience waiting.
When it came to casting the role of Cecilia, he was looking for an actress who could carry the whole movie. “She’s a character who is in every scene except for two.” Moss — whose career has encompassed Mad Men, The Handmaid’s Tale, Her Smell and Us — was an obvious choice, he says. “I’m so happy she said yes because she pulls off the character in a way that is more powerful than I could have hoped for.”
Working with Moss involved a level of collaboration he hadn’t experienced with an actor before. “We talked a lot on set and in preproduction. We would schedule these long chats. I would say to the line producer ‘I need three hours with Elisabeth today’ and we would just sit in a room and talk.
“She really was my partner in crime. We were constantly talking and making notes and I would be cutting out lines of dialogue as we were shooting the scene, to adjust to what she had. And the end result is that the character is the product of both of us.”
Whannell describes Moss as “a pro athlete version of an actor. She doesn’t need to lock herself in a dark room for two hours to get to a dark place. I feel like she’s trained herself to turn it on and off like a spigot.” She prepares scrupulously, he says. “She’s still doing a lot of thinking and putting in as much work as an insanely researched method actor would.
“She’ll be doing a scene when her face will be covered in tears, she’ll be screaming from the depths of insanity, and then she’ll turn to me with this benign look on her face and say, ‘Do you want one less?’ ”
At the same time, she’s always up for improvisation, for doing things on the spur of the moment. “She doesn’t want to live with something and rehearse it a million times,” he says. “She wants to talk about it, but she doesn’t want to rehearse it because she wants to live it right there in front of the camera for the first time.”
The Invisible Man opens on February 27.