What I’m Watching: Invisible Man (2020)

So, a woman (Elisabeth Moss) who’s apparently been given everything she wants, sabotages security systems and flees her husband’s home in the night, releases his dog, dings his car. Then she acts like a prisoner in a “safe house” of a single black cop and his daughter, but never explains why. The husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, generic English prettyboy but has the stupid Millennial mullet, which means he’s coded as villain) is so distraught he commits suicide, and the disrespectful wench can’t even sit through his prepared statement at the will reading, only wants money money money.

To say I’m not sympathetic to the viewpoint character is a massive understatement. You need to show, not tell, to get any kind of sympathy.

Lifetime Movie Aside: There’s a movie I saw, Enough (2002, Jennifer Lopez), a ripoff of Sleeping with the Enemy (1991, Julia Roberts) where it spends half the film showing her life with an abusive husband who makes her clean perfectly, turn can labels forward in a cupboard, behave perfectly, every petty thing, or he’ll beat her; then she escapes, learns “krav maga” (but what it shows is just kickboxing/tai chi), and kicks his ass. It was as preposterous as any other Lifetime movie, but I didn’t mind it because it shows, not tells.

Anyway, then she goes paranoid, starts seeing moving shadows, and footprints in sheets in an utterly dark room we can’t see anything in either, finds things she lost, and starts committing crimes and claiming her dead, invisible husband did it.

She tries to get a new job, and stays at the safe house, despite having all the money money money from her dead husband’s estate. None of her behavior makes sense for someone newly rich. Did the writer (Leigh Whannell, dude best known for the horrendous Saw movies) just forget they’d done that? If he wrote this as little snippets while drinking, it would explain a lot of the “plot”. In fact, several of the “I won’t hurt you, I’ll hurt them!” bits are straight out of Saw.

Security Aside: This shouldn’t be news to anyone in 2020, but lock your damned computer. On the Mac, you can do System Preferences, Desktop, Screen Saver, Start after 5 minutes (or whatever), then Security, General, Require Password 5 Seconds after screen saver. The  menu also has ^⌘Q Lock Screen now (formerly in Keychain Access); I don’t know/care how Windows and Linux do it, but you can figure it out. Now nobody can get to your desktop and send emails pretending to be you. This is the most basic security procedure. She h4xx0r3d her husband’s security at the start, and lip-polishes over the webcam (which on good computers can’t be accessed without the green light), so clearly learning security matters… Then she doesn’t do the most basic thing. And while I’m at hit, the dead husband had terrible choices for passwords and PINs, do not use important dates in your life! Memorize random number & word sequences!

If this was going to be a psychological study of PTSD, then pretending that the “bad guy” is actually doing it ruins that. If it’s going to be an Invisible Man horror story, then never showing the invisible man doing anything until nearly the end ruins that. Either way, it’s just 90 minutes of Elisabeth Moss whining. Egregiously so when she whines “You can have any girl! I’m just a suburban girl!”; Mz Moss is dressed down in hoodies and bad makeup here, and nearing 40 not as young as Peggy on Mad Men, but she’s still cute, fit, in the top 1% of pretty girls. Can you imagine what kind of psychological damage this is inflicting on girls who aren’t her? “Nobody will ever love you if you don’t look better than Mz Moss” is the writer’s message. FUCK THIS GUY.

Suit Applications Aside: Suppose the invisible super-suit did exist (which it does not, it’s her delusion). Every military, espionage, and assassination organization in the world would want it. Who cares about one possibly crazy ex-wife, if you get the ultimate weapon? And what happens when you scale that up to tanks, planes, missiles? You think a cop is gonna let someone walk off with one?

When the brother-in-law offers to make charges go away, to protect his brother’s kid, he’s just doing his filial duty, it’s not a trap. And poor Zeus the dog, he just wants both his people back, but they keep fighting.

The entire last third of the film is a delusional, hallucinating, psychotic widow killing family, friends, and anyone else getting in her way. It’s tragic, but there’s no invisible man.

★★☆☆☆

(Disclaimer: Movie tropes about insanity are not reality; I’m not characterizing actual mental illness this way.)