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The Invisible Man and Hitchcock, Specifically(MAJOR SPOILERS)

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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MAJOR SPOILER FOR THE INVISIBLE MAN (2020)

MAJOR SPOILER

MAJOR SPOILER

Here it comes:

About mid-way through the film, a distraught Elisabeth Moss seeks a dinner meeting with her sister in a trendy restaurant, with lots of upscale diners around them. Moss is trying to convince the sister that it is the invisible man(not Moss) who has sent to the sister angry, insulting e-mails ostensibly from Moss. The sister calms down a bit, sends the too-friendly waiter away with a bit of attitude("we're gonna need a long time to decide on the menu") and starts to calm down , seeing how distraught Moss is. Maybe these two can reconcile.

But then we notice -- floating in air above the table between the two women -- a big gleaming knife(from the dinner table) and then -- the knife comes down and slashes the throat of Moss's sister deeply and fatally. Blood all over the table. The knife falls -- Moss picks it up. All the patrons see -- Moss with a knife and a dead woman bleeding all over the place. All the other patrons, jump up, scream, and run away. The cops come to bust "killer" Moss.

Its the UN murder scene in North by Northwest, but done for R-rated blood and gore -- courtesy of Psycho's initial decades ago entry point and, notably, this throat slash(of a woman) rather uses the same look and technique of the throat slashing of the Lady on the Toilet in Psycho III(1986)

My audience screamed a little -- but I've read that the screams are bigger in fuller theaters in bigger cities that mine. And that's an achievement in this day and age: the scene is a true shocker, out of nowhere, with the Hitchcock reference(for those who are looking) and also a bit of LA Confidential( the famous scene where a hero gets suddenly killed mid-film -- since copied in Minority Report and The Departed.)

This scene in The Invisible Man is the best scene in the film -- other than the twisty ending, which still isn't as good as THIS. Its legitimately scary, its bloody, the Hitchcock references are there for those of us who know them, its even a little bit funny(Moss is caught red handed as Thornhill was at the UN...though he escaped)...but it is also sad and also enraging. The sister was a good, innocent person(however rude to waiters -- was this to make her less sympathetic -- I think it was to divert our attention from the shock yet to come) and we are ENRAGED that the invisible psycho lover would do this to her.
Its the first time in the film that The Invisible Man kills someone -- and now the thriller is truly underway.

Not a GREAT thriller, mind you, but a good one -- with that great surprise shocker scene for applause...

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

As long as this post is a MAJOR SPOILER post, rather than give away the ending entirely, I believe I can note that one of the nifty aspects of how the story plays out is that at the end, in the final scene, The Invisible Man is finally visible, and after all the horrible, cruel, abusive, sadistic, gaslighting and murderous things this ultra-rich Silicon Valley scientific mastermind has done...he's rather a wimpish, weaselly looking guy , even if a handsome one. For purposes of the story, he is acting entirely NICE toward his ex-lover Elisabeth Moss. We are to believe that either he did NOT commit all those horrible crimes(another invisible man did)...or that he is so ice cold that he will let that other(dead) man take the fall for his evil.

But its the actor who intrigued me...such a regular looking guy. Nothing particularly terrifying about him. His invisibility gave him power.