Gaslighter: THE INVISIBLE MAN

Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man knows a monster movie is only as good as its metaphor. Thus it spins a gripping, upsetting, and satisfying chiller out of a great one. It starts with a woman (Elisabeth Moss) escaping an abusive relationship, her controlling boyfriend (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) so outraged at that prospect that, when he awakes to find her sneaking away in the middle of the night, he runs at the car and punches its window out. She just barely flees, and as she tries to recover a life for herself with the help of her sister (Harriet Dyer) and a friend (Aldis Hodge), she feels haunted by her poisonous relationship. The key to the film’s working so well is its grounding the psychology of these opening scenes. Selling the realism of the moment is a raw and open performance from Moss (drawing on her Mad Men poise and Handmaid's Tale despair) and tenterhooks prickling filmmaking from Whannell (veteran genre craftsman most recently of the gory good sci-fi actioner Upgrade). There's a deliberate pace, ice-cold cinematography often isolating her in the frame, amped-up sound design making every sudden noise a potential threat. It puts the audience in her headspace. This isn’t merely a pulp start; an entirely convincing realistic drama might be spun from these truthful, observant scenes of a woman readjusting after living under the thumb of a cruel, manipulative partner. The acting is rooted in precisely calibrated real-world horror. Her partner was already a monster before he’s even more of a monster. 

That the movie uses this sturdy, steady foundation for its central metaphor makes everything that follows all the more effective and suspenseful. A couple weeks after her escape, she hears that he’s killed himself. This should make her feel safer. At least, that’s what her support system tries to tell her. But she can’t shake the feeling that her abuser is around — a hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck sense that someone is watching. When it escalates to objects in the background suddenly moving — a gleaming knife slipping off that counter; a disembodied puff of breath on a cold porch — and then props in the foreground behaving strangely — an open door, a yanked sheet — it’s clear there’s something going on. And it’s even clearer that every little ghost-story style poltergeist activity is calibrated to make her appear crazy, to sow doubt in her support system, to isolate her and maintain her invisible abuser’s manipulative control over her life. It’s a haunting metaphor, and the undetectable, unpredictable effects of its monster’s actions make for truly unsettling negative space, and the most jolting of jump scares. As the movie springs its surprises, explaining its conceit, revealing new layers of horror, and paying off elements you won’t even realize were setups in the first place, Whannell takes great pleasure in playing the audience, twisting the knife with sudden shocks while dangling the possibility for catharsis. It’s an exceptionally well-crafted feat of genre fare, brilliantly reconfiguring H.G. Wells’ original idea via the recently buzzworded classic film Gaslight into a freshly creepy bit of horror filmmaking. It’s hugely entertaining with its chilly tension impressively sustained, while at its center is the painful story of a woman whose inside-out understanding of her ex’s evil is dangerously disbelieved.

No Scare in Sight: INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 3

Ghosts are always operating out of the same playbook. You can’t see a movie haunting without some aggrieved spirit’s paranormal activity following a familiar pattern. First, small objects are unaccountably rearranged. Then there are strange noises – thumps, voices, bells, and whispers – though it rarely comes right out and say what it wants. Finally, the ghost makes a move towards its real aim: an abduction, a possession, a curse, and so on and so forth and what have you. Do the freshly deceased attend some sort of haunting seminar? Maybe there’s mandatory accomplishing-unfinished-business training? Is there an application to become an accredited poltergeist? Because heaven forbid some grabby ghost just snatches a soul willy-nilly without going through the proper steps. There’s apparently a clear process to follow.

There was plenty of time to think about such things while watching Insidious: Chapter 3. I had to do something to pass the time. Most horror movies, even the bad ones, can kick up enough general unease or sprinkle in enough jump scares to keep me alert. But this one, the second sequel to what was a clever and effective spin on the haunted house subgenre, is dull. It didn’t scare me. It not only won’t trouble my sleep, it almost put me to sleep. I could feel a nap tugging at the edges of my attention. But I stayed awake, even though its loudest jolt is right before the end credits, a good way to make sure a dozing audience wakes up in time to exit the theater.

Chapter 3 is technically a prequel, finding Lin Shaye’s psychic character a few years before the events of the first two Insidious chapters. (If you think 3 will do a lot of foreshadowing with regards to her fate in the other entries, you would be correct.) Shaye, a longtime character actress, does well with a lead role, playing a character with grandmotherly feeling about her, but she’s also weary and sad from all the ghosts she’s had to communicate with over the years. She’s a terrific presence, but the movie proceeds to let her down. Her character’s prior terrific mysteriousness is laboriously explained away. And despite what feels like constant paranormal assaults, there’s never much in the way of a good disquieting rattle to match her weariness. It’s all rather superfluous, unless you’re really curious to see how she met her goofy assistants.

The scenario isn’t as intriguing as either the original or its lesser sequel. Proving all you need to make a horror movie is a girl and a ghost, Chapter 3 finds a teenage girl (Stefanie Scott) mourning the death of her mother. She’s made increasingly vulnerable by the vengeful spirit (Michael Reid MacKay) who breaks her legs, leaving her housebound with only a skeptical father (Dermot Mulroney) to help her. It takes him noticing the black paint footprints on the carpet before he believes something’s haunting. That’s when the psychics are called in. It’s a totally standard horror set-up, but nothing that couldn’t work if the old clichés were executed well. After all, its predecessors weren’t exactly reinventing the wheel and had much of the same creepy visions.

But you can feel a difference behind the camera this time, with the series’ screenwriter Leigh Whannell making his directorial debut. (James Wan, who helmed the first two, went off to make Furious 7, a better use of his time.) The images lack the same creepy snap, and they’re cut together in a way that really only communicates rudimentary horror concepts. At best, it repeats tricks we’ve seen in the other Insidious movies, silhouettes behind curtains, faces in the dark, that sort of thing. He certainly didn’t help matters by writing himself an awfully thin script, with half-developed stock characters and a limply formulaic story. (A few supporting characters even disappear, and not in a scary way, never to be mentioned again.) It has the feeling of a cheap direct-to-video sequel that has somehow escaped its disc and wound up in multiplexes.

Things Still Going Bump in the Night: INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2

A group of paranormal investigators have broken into the long abandoned home of a deceased serial killer. One of them slowly approaches a dusty chest latched shut in a creaky corner, arms outstretched to open the mysterious storage unit. That’s when a lady in the audience shouted, “That’s probably not a good idea!” That made me laugh, mostly because of her qualifying the statement with a “probably.” It’s most definitely a bad idea to do anything in the long abandoned home of a deceased serial killer, especially if you’re in a horror movie, most especially if you’re in a horror movie as dutifully predictable as Insidious: Chapter 2. It’s the kind of movie that, when a flutter of white fabric flits through a doorway deep in the background and Barbara Hershey nervously calls out “Renai?” you can be completely and totally sure that that’s not Renai at the end of the hall.

James Wan directs from collaborator Leigh Whannell’s screenplay, using the jumbled, thoroughly extraneous sequel to their original film as nothing more than an excuse to show us some of the inventory in his bag of horror filmmaking tricks. To be sure, Wan did that with their creepy Insidious in 2011 as well as his even scarier The Conjuring this summer. In Insidious: Chapter 2, however, we have nothing more than a rehashing and recapitulation of the previous film in ways that are theoretically interesting, but are in practice rather hollow. All the tricks in the world couldn’t have saved this movie that’s only interested in picking up where the story left off, finding ways to repeat what came before, echoing or outright restaging from different perspectives all the best scares from the first film on its way to a similar conclusion.  

As the pre-credit jump scare at the end of Insidious implied, after rescuing one of their sons (Ty Simpkins) from the clutches of an evil ghost in a shadowy spirit world, Renai (Rose Byrne) suspects her husband Josh (Patrick Wilson) returned with a possessive evil clinging to him. Chapter 2 picks up shortly thereafter, as Josh tries to convince his wife that moving into his childhood home with his mother (Hershey) will help them move on. She’s not buying it, especially as ghosts appear frequently in ways she recognizes from the first time. It feels like what the second half of a far-too-overlong version of the original film would’ve entailed. If the first was in some ways a riff on Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, this is most definitely a Poltergeist II: The Other Side. Sequels mean never having to say it’ll never happen again. Here, it all happens again.

There are mysterious noises, startling apparitions, slamming doors, bleats of punctuating orchestration, portentous dreams, a return of the bumbling tech-head ghost hunters (Whannell and Angus Sampson), and loud, sudden ghostly activity. It’s all so very familiar, sometimes reusing footage of the first film in moderately clever ways. But it proceeds with a sadly draining sense of repetition. In the first film, scary things happen to frightened people. This time, frightened people happen to scary things, a small but important shift. Since the hauntings have followed the characters from the first time, they have more agency and information. Rather than using that to catch on more quickly to what’s happening and use the knowledge of the first film in sharp ways, the plot requires the main characters to blindly stumble into similar troubles while side characters set off on an investigation into a spooky boarded-up hospital and an eerie abandoned house. I suppose I don’t mind that on principle, but did they have to go in at night armed only with low-wattage flashlights and a set of woo woo spirit-communication dice? It’s like they knew that’d be the creepiest way to go about it.

After getting his first big break with the inventive, but icky for icky’s sake, 2004 feature Saw, Wan has slowly but surely become a confident horror director. He plays on fears by foregrounding what’s inside and outside of the frame, moving the camera in sometimes-masterful ways to reveal scares and withhold jolts until the tension of not getting a shock is almost unbearable. But here he’s putting his talents to use with awfully thin material, cheaply repetitive and recycled, not just from its own predecessor, but from a whole host of horror tropes. The whole thing is shivery, but never truly scary, with jump scares that can’t even make it to the level of a jolt. In its entirety, it is less frightening than any given five minute stretch of The Conjuring. It’s the kind of stale regurgitation that gives horror sequels a bad name.

Things That Go Bump in the Night: INSIDIOUS

Insidious is like a rickety old carnival ride where half the fun is knowing exactly how the ride will try to startle you but then getting startled anyway. Here every jump-scare with a blast of sound is every bit as surprising and painful as getting your chest slammed into a rusty safety bar with a quick scrape of the ride’s gears. Director James Wan and his screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who made a big splash with the original Saw, have made a simply effective piece of horror. I didn’t much care for their debut and haven’t seen any of Wan’s other films, but this film works on a primal genre level.

As in most any haunted house movie, this one begins with a likable young family moving into a house with creaky floorboards and dark shadows. The husband (Patrick Wilson) heads off to work and the sons (Ty Simpkins and Andrew Astor) go to school, leaving the wife (Rose Byrne) and their infant to first encounter the strange goings-on. Things begin casually creepy. First, misplaced objects. Then, strange sounds, floorboards creak with no one stepping on them. Then, is that a voice I hear, whispering ever so softly? Then, what is that figure flashing through my peripheral vision?

So far, these are all standard elements for this type of film, but the real horror starts with a scene that’s chilling in its matter-of-fact normalcy, in an everyday event just enough wrong to feel hopelessly horrifying. One morning Wilson heads upstairs to wake up one son who is sleeping in particularly late. He does the usual fatherly calls to “Get up!” accompanied by turning on the light. Then he puts a hand on the corner of the mattress and shakes it, calling louder. Then he puts his hand on the boy’s arm and moves it. But this small, helpless child simply won’t wake up.

We quickly learn that he’s in a coma. This is an all too plausible occurrence that anchors the escalating horror to come. Wan builds the tension with expert freak-out jolts like when, in the middle of the night, the front door is mysteriously open. Or when a dark figure can be glimpsed in the corner of a bedroom. Or when a mother rounds the corner to see a ghostly man standing next to her baby’s crib. That moment in particular reveals the knowingness with which Wan deploys these shocks. I saw the ghost before the characters and beat the soundtrack’s blast, which occurs only after the characters have had a scare. By that point, my stomach had already twisted into a knot.

By the time the third act arrives, we find typical haunted house material (paranormal investigators, a psychic, and a séance) played with a bit of a twist. Without giving too much away, it’s safe to say that the investigators (Angus Sampson and the film’s writer Leigh Whannell) are nerdy guys who are trying to one-up each other with their unwieldy homemade paranormal sensors. The psychic (Lin Shaye) is ominously warm and grandmotherly, until she starts dictating dark visions and insists on wearing a gas mask during the séance, which punctuates the already creepy scene with thick raspy breaths.

Insidious is scary but not frightening, surprising but not scarring. It’s not a great movie but it’s great, rickety genre fun. It’s not as great as Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, my personal favorite of this subgenre, but it’s still an effective effort. Wan plays with tropes and clichés and finds new ways (and some old dependable ways) to make an audience, at least the one with which I saw this, flinch, gasp and squirm at all the right moments.