Film Review: ‘The Invisible Man’ is a scary sight for sore eyes

A million You Go Girl memes were born the day Peggy Olson strutted cigarette in mouth, dead plant in hand, out of that advertising office in Mad Men, and Elisabeth Moss has become the (thankfully somewhat uneasy) standard bearer of that sentiment ever since. “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” scrawled in a closet on The Handmaid’s Tale, the grand dame rallying cry of every Pussy Hat Parade from here to Tacoma — don’t let those bastards get you down. We know Moss, whether weighed down by red robes or retro corporate pencil skirts, is gonna stick it to The Man.

And frankly we’re one hundred percent here for it. These are the fantasies of our #MeToo times, the Busby Berkeley dance circle distractions from the Great Depressions of this unabashed trash-fire of a Trump Era. Moss is the plucky gal in the middle of the perfect storm of water maidens spinning and spitting in concentric shapes around her, rolling her wild eyes back into her skull and shrieking loud and shrieking long for every which one of us. She gives our madness a face.

Leigh Whannell’s re-envisioning of The Invisible Man, a grand trash hoot of a good time at the movies, will maybe, when we look back on this period, turn out to be the biggest sparkling-est jewel in the crown of what I can only call the MeToo-sploitation genre. It’s a little bit Sleeping With the Enemy, and a whole lot of Ingrid Bergman rummaging around in an attic hearing noises that aren’t there in George Cukor’s Gaslight, and all with a gaudy dollop of Nomi Malone’s “revenge nails” in Showgirls painted on top. It’s electric.

The film opens by dropping us right down in escape. Cecelia (Moss) is getting away from her abusive Frankenstein-tall monster of a husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, scarcely glimpsed in the flesh) by any means necessary. She drugs him and runs off in the middle of the night, albeit taking her too sweet time padding about his cliffside cement modernist nightmare home on her way out — all the better for Whannell to start showing off the film’s second best asset (after Moss herself of course), his medium-long shots. 

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The Invisible Man appears in theaters on February 28 from Universal Pictures.