That’s why he needs her: because he can’t have her. As Tom explains to Cecilia-because the movie needs to remind us repeatedly why someone like him would want someone like her-no one has ever left him. He’s just a tech bro, maybe corrupted by his wealth, though it’s more likely he’s always been this way. And that he is probably really pissed off.Īdrian is a psychopath, and the movie quickly proves as much, but unlike previous iterations of the Invisible Man story, he isn’t driven mad by the chemicals that make him invisible (as in James Whale’s 1933 version), nor is he pushed to Ubermensch levels of depravity by his new power (see Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man). Knowing that her recently deceased ex-boyfriend is a world-leading mind in the field of OPTICS, she pretty efficiently surmises that he is not dead. What’s not great is the night Cecilia encounters what seems to be an invisible person standing on her bedsheet. Still, she buys James a ladder and gives Sydney all the money she’ll need to go to college, which is great. “This is what he does,” she tells anyone and everyone. Even when his brother Tom (Michael Dorman) tells Cecilia that Adrian died of suicide, and that he left her $5M to be paid out in monthly installments (should she not commit a crime, become mentally unstable, etc.), she can’t quite accept that she’s safe. His gaze is unbroken.Ĭecilia spends the next two weeks in hiding, doing her best to live at her friend James’s (Aldis Hodge) house with his daughter Sydney (Storm Reid) and with the terror that Adrian will show up any minute. He has the money and resources to peer into any corner of Cecilia’s life. Surveillance cameras limn every inch of Adrian’s home later he’ll use a simple email to ruin Cecilia’s relationship with her sister. Never one to be subtle with his themes, Whannell has his villain be a genius in the technology of “seeing,” in how we see, to update the Universal Monster story to embrace digital technology as our primary mode of modern sight. According to Cecilia, Adrian made a fortune as a leading figure in “optics” (OPTICS!) and met the self-described “suburban girl” at a party a few years before. His name is Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), the surname, along with the main character’s penchant for violence, a key indicator of the movie’s debt to both H.G. We wonder: Why would she run like this if she weren’t abused? Why would she have a secret compartment in their closet where she can stow an away bag? Then Cecilia’s boyfriend appears next to the car and punches in its window. Two masterfully wielded jump scares accompany her escape, one harmless and the other brutal within this breathless opening, Leigh Whannell both charts the geography of crucial plot points to come-it’s important we know about this house-and sets the tone of the trauma under which Cecilia will labor for the rest of the film. Aided by elemental forces, her exquisitely wealthy boyfriend’s Silicon Valley house always blanketed by the deafening crash of ocean waves, Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) softly pads her way out of bed, through the high-tech laboratory and the Tesla-filled garage, across the vast lawn, over the wall of his compound and into the car of her sister (Harriet Dyer).
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