The ending of the film-where Linda becomes the Final Girl, pushing Sebastian to his death-is a pretty clear indication of whose side Verhoeven has taken. With that history in mind, Hollow Man reads more like an indictment of men and their sadistic obsession with controlling women. As a director, Verhoeven has always displayed a fascination with exploring the objectification and sexual exploitation of women in his films, most notably in his infamous 1995 flop Showgirls. He even rapes an unnamed woman (Rhona Mitra) simply because he can. His obsession with her, coupled with the anger over his invisible form and confinement to his lab, fuels Sebastian’s jealous, misogynistic, and murderous rampage. Sebastian’s main target is Linda (Elisabeth Shue), an ex-girlfriend who is secretly seeing their colleague Matt (Josh Brolin). But at the end of the film, he dies with Flora at his bedside, becoming visible again as he passes.
The 1933 James Whale film adaptation is savvy enough to include a prominent female character to bear witness to Griffin’s self-destructive actions: The titular invisible man quickly becomes a villain, sidelining his lover, Flora, in the process. Wells’s book is about what happens when a man gains the power to act and live beyond his physical form its protagonist, Griffin, spends most of the novel interacting with men, women existing only in the periphery. Unsurprisingly, The Invisible Man feels significantly more refreshing in its portrayal of women than the 1897 novel it’s based on, which didn’t give much thought to female characters at all.
As a newly (titular) invisible man, Adrian devotes all his time to abusing Cecilia-and by faking his death, he’s quickly able to both torment her while also making everyone in her life believe she is violent and unstable. But she soon realizes that he’s not really gone-he’s just found a new way to control her. Once Cecilia is safely away from Adrian, she’s made to believe that he’s committed suicide. We watch as she quietly sneaks out of bed, disables Adrian’s security system, and runs frantically off his property toward the main road. She leaves him in the middle of the night in a tense sequence that opens the film. Moss plays our protagonist, Cecilia, a troubled woman desperate for freedom from the controlling Adrian, a chilly and enigmatic scientist she’s dating. Coming 20 years after the last big-screen attempt to adapt the story-Paul Verhoeven’s 2000 Kevin Bacon vehicle, Hollow Man- The Invisible Man succeeds where its predecessor fails, injecting its source material with a timely critique that dismantles the myth of the “male genius.” Wells story with the harrowing narrative of a woman trying to escape her abusive boyfriend. Written and directed by Leigh Whannell, it combines the classic H. Beyond its commercial success as one of the year’s best thrillers, the Elisabeth Moss movie, which stayed strong into its second weekend, also serves as a welcome (and timely!) reminder of horror’s roots in social and political commentary.
When The Invisible Man hit theaters two weekends ago, audiences embraced it-as they did with previous Blumhouse successes Get Out and the Purge franchise before it- to the tune of a $29 million opening-box-office cume.
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