NEW RELEASE: THE INVISIBLE MAN




Going to the cinema to see a movie on your own is a beautiful affair. You can sit on your own: And own the two seats around you. One for the cap and coat and the other for the popcorn. You don’t have the troops of annoyances around you, be it the guys who went for a beer beforehand, the guy who checks his Facebook during the trailers (I mean: REALLY?), or the chatterboxes, be them kids or people lacking in the realisation that the cinema experience is about shutting up and watching, not chatting about the latest episode of Celebrity Kardashian Love Idol.

 Within that, there's the special genre: The horror crowd. For some reason people like to get together and make sure that somewhere in space, they will have heard you scream. Apparently, crapping yourself is not just an experience that a total deviant wants.

Wind this forward about three quarters of an hour into ‘The Invisible Man’, and I wish that there was more of a horror cluster. Because quite frankly, I could have used a shoulder to hide behind. 

 Or a look of assurance. Or something. Anything.

This movie starts with a woman (the quite brilliant Elizabeth Moss) sprinting away from her horrific marriage to a manipulative, evil tech genius. She’s in a nightmare until she finds out that he’s dead. 

 It’s all going to be OK right? 

 Suddenly things start happening around her, as though she’s being psychologically and physically messed with (to use a nicer term) by an Invisible Man who might or might not be her may or may not be dead husband.

Every moment during the film you dread something terrible Will happen. Your face spends half of its time hiding behind a hand, your heart doing Ford AND Ferrari, and your ears bombarded by a score that’s so much scarier when there’s nobody there to absorb the surround sound. It's like modern Hitchcock, except we know who the psycho is, and he really wants to hurt the fly.

 The rest I'm not going to give away, save to say that this 'Invisible Man' is a long way away from the utter shlock put forward by Kevin Bacon in 'Hollow Man', which was based on the HG Wells' book.

 Also, Moss is fantastic, playing the woman who's haunted, battling against the unknown. 

 But after leaving the cinema, I watched my hands. They were still shaking. I felt a little more worried than usual in the blackness of the cinema. 

 Of course, I told the couple behind me as we left that I had 'seen it all coming'. I should have said more honestly: ‘Mate, I was so bloody scared during that that I nearly left because I nearly had a heart attack’.

Go. But bring a friend and possibly a change of underwear.

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