In the before times, when films were still being released in cinemas, The Invisible Man staked an early claim as the year’s best mainstream blockbuster. A steely, sharp-witted reimagination of a dusty old Universal fantasy franchise, Leigh Whannell’s film succeeded by flipping audience expectations of whose story to tell from its far-fetched premise: not the millionaire playboy scientist who discovers ingenious means of invisibility, but the ordinary, unassuming woman – played with frenzied commitment by Elisabeth Moss – he chooses to torment with these powers, in ways only she can see and feel.
Now out on streaming and DVD, it’s a horror film that assumes the victim’s perspective in ways both bracing and classical: there may be a rich tradition of imperilled horror heroines pursued by violent, insistent men, but The Invisible Man builds her plight as a thoroughly era-attuned meditation on toxic masculinity and the difficulty that victimised women often have in being believed. Among its many virtues, Whannell’s film offers a perfect metaphorical primer on the concept of “gaslighting” – a buzzword often thrown about these days to refer to any form of lying. Its true meaning, that of undermining someone’s trust in their own sanity, is a rather more subtle, insidious process, presented here to maximum claustrophobic effect.
Cinema, of course, has a rich tradition of gaslighting thrillers, beginning with the one that popularised the term in the first place. The Invisible Man carries no small amount of DNA from Gaslight, the 1940s psychodrama based on a Patrick Hamilton play, with its Victorian story of a dastardly husband manipulating his new bride’s psyche, beginning with the simple hiding and moving of objects in the home. It was filmed twice in four years: the original British version from 1940 (available on Amazon) is tighter and a little more ghoulish, but the 1944 Hollywood remake (on Chili) benefits from swoonily lush production values and the Oscar-winning emotional turbulence of Ingrid Bergman’s performance: gaslighting has certainly never been more beautiful than it is here.
The gaslit woman has subsequently become a regular trope in Hollywood suspense and horror cinema. In 1964, Bette Davis’s doddery heiress was cunningly tilted toward madness by her wily, money-grubbing cousin Olivia de Havilland in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (on iTunes), a shadowy, slow-burning slab of Southern gothic that has aged rather elegantly. It was intended as a follow-up to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane until Joan Crawford declined to work with Davis again: instead, Crawford opted to play the hysterically gaslit, axe-murdering protagonist of Strait-Jacket (on Amazon), an unabashed B-movie that exploits the most lurid (not to mention ableist) possibilities of the premise: “Warning! Strait-Jacket vividly depicts axe murders!” screamed the poster, so you know where you are with this one. But it’s a high-camp hoot.
Gaslighting stories aren’t limited to the thriller genre, of course. Humidly expanded by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal from a one-act play by the former, Suddenly, Last Summer (on Amazon) proved it could be the foundation of full-blown melodrama. Wealthy dowager Katharine Hepburn is so desperate to refute the mental stability of her psychologically fragile niece Elizabeth Taylor – and thus suppress a supposedly unsavoury family secret – that she pushes for a lobotomy. It’s deliciously overheated stuff, but the performances give it cruel emotional weight. Fast-forwarding to the 1980s, Overboard (on iTunes) attempted the unlikely balancing act of a gaslighting romcom, as snooty rich girl Goldie Hawn is afflicted with the kind of convenient movie amnesia that makes it a cinch for opportunistic carpenter Kurt Russell to swan in and claim he was her husband all along. The film relies on the couple’s sparky chemistry to make it seem cuter than it is: perhaps it should have been a thriller after all.
Recently, the gaslighting trope has returned to its more familiar context. Angelina Jolie in Clint Eastwood’s handsome, mournful Changeling (on Netflix) and Emily Blunt in the glossy trash diversion The Girl on the Train (on Amazon) both get put through the ringer, encouraged by patriarchal authorities to disbelieve their own eyes. In Steven Soderbergh’s grimy, gripping Unsane (free on Amazon Prime), Claire Foy is scammed into entering an institution, made to wonder if she belongs there or not. The fast-progressing conversation around mental health is taking this subgenre into new, more nuanced territory – though as The Invisible Man shows tensely, movie gaslighters will thrive as long as women aren’t believed.
Also new on streaming and DVD
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
(Netflix)
Since coronavirus put paid to this year’s Eurovision song contest, superfans of the annual kitsch extravaganza will have to make do with Will Ferrell’s all-star sendup. But is it possible to parody Eurovision better than it does itself?
Fanny Lye Deliver’d
(Vertigo, 18)
Long-delayed, this dreamy, eccentric throwback to 1970s folk-horror was shot in 2016: you can see why a peculiar 17th-century tale of religious puritanism gone awry was a tough sell, and it’s stronger on buildup than payoff, but its atmosphere lingers.
Greed
(Sony, 15)
Michael Winterbottom is so prolific, and seems to come by ideas so easily, that many of his films aren’t as richly conceived as they could be. This thinly veiled, half-hearted Philip Green satire is no exception: it’s all lurid, shiny mock-doc posturing with no real bite.
Scorsese Shorts
(Sony, 15)
Something rare and special from the Criterion Collection: a compilation of five early, digitally restored short films by Martin Scorsese, taking us from his 1960s student days to later 1970s polish, and ranging from intimate documentary to aggressive experimentation.
Ema
(Mubi, 15)
Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín is never predictable, but even fans like me were thrown for a loop by this restless, hypnotic novelty, fusing a toxic marital drama with untamed reggaeton dance spectacle – out now on physical media, for the benefit of non-Mubi subscribers.
