3 min readNew DelhiFeb 26, 2020 12:08 PM IST
Critics have been showering praise on Elisabeth Moss’ performance in The Invisible Man.
Elisabeth Moss starrer The Invisible Man has received a mixed response from critics, with many hailing Moss’ act. The science-fiction drama has been helmed by Leigh Whannell and produced by Jason Blum. Apart from Moss, the movie also features Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Harriet Dyer, Michael Dorman and Oliver Jackson-Cohen.
“This gratifyingly clever and, at times, powerfully staged thriller is too rooted in our era to be called old-fashioned — its release, in fact, feels almost karmically synched to the week of the Harvey Weinstein verdict. Yet there’s one way that the movie is old-fashioned: It does an admirable job of taking us back to a time when a horror film could actually mean something,” wrote Variety’s Owen Gleiberman in his review of the movie.
Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt called the film a little silly but heaped praise on Elisabeth Moss’ performance.
“A lot of the story’s grip-hold is owed to Moss’s performance: raw, jittery, and almost unbearably tensed, she’s a woman whose own body is a prison, as long as her ex walks around without one,” Leah wrote in her review.
“Rather than attempt to recreate the gothic, old school charms of the original Invisible Man, or worse – created an action movie ripe for the now-failed Dark Universe – Whannell’s The Invisible Man forges its own path, and brings this classic scenario into the real world. Some of the best horror films are those that take otherworldly scenarios and graft them onto current events – think of They Live and its reaction to Reaganomics; Night of the Living Dead‘s unspoken reflection on racism in America; or David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly and its relation to the AIDS epidemic. The real-world situations butting-up against the supernatural make those films all the more effective – and scary,” read a section of Chris Evangelista’s review for Slash Film.
The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee had more than a few superlatives reserved for Elisabeth Moss’ performance, however, he called out the build-up of the film.
“While I do crave the opportunity to see her in more films that don’t require quite so much sexual, physical and emotional abuse, she’s compelling as ever here, slickly transferring her skills to a far broader canvas, pushing herself through yet another gruelling obstacle course with gusto. It’s a fiery performance but even she struggles with an uneven final act that goes deep into genre excess with some outsized, and nonsensical, action as well as some ropey effects and a glaring plot-hole that’s left clumsily unresolved,” a part of the review read.
Story continues below this ad
IndieWire film critic Jude Dry gave the movie a D+ and said, “The best genre films play on society’s most pressing fears, but in his limp reworking of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell tries melding everything from gaslighting to anxieties around data privacy into a crude technological thriller that is part sci-fi, part horror, and all-around mess.”
Critics have been showering praise on Elisabeth Moss’ performance in The Invisible Man.