Here is Elizabeth Moss again in another film which can be characterized as being about the kind of shit women have to put up with. In keeping with the source material by H.G. Wells. all good treatments of the story have focused on the inherently horrifying aspect of the premise. What this adaptation brings is that it is from the perspective of the victim and is perhaps the most extreme form of gaslighting anyone has ever imagined. Unfortunately the plot tries to be just a little too clever and the film could probably benefit from being shorter.

A desperate Cecilia escapes from her wealthy and obsessively controlling partner Adrian, a pioneer in the field of optics. She spends weeks hiding out in the home of a friend, police detective James and his daughter Sydney, and refuses to come out of the house. But then she learns that Adrian is dead of an apparent suicide and has left a great deal of money to her in his will. She is suspicious however as she knows Adrian isn’t this kind of person and soon enough strange things start happening. She hears strange noises and sees things out of the corner of her eye. When she goes to a job interview, her portfolio is empty and she faints, having being mysteriously dosed with a drug. She comes to believe that Adrian is alive and has invented technology which allows him to become invisible and interfere with her life. But no one believes her and her tormentor systematically tries to ruin her support network of friends and family to make everyone believe that she is insane.

As my wife noted, this is an out and out horror film and a scarily effective one at that. Cecilia faces an enemy who is not only invisible but one who is intelligent and knows every detail of her personal life. It would be trivially easy for Adrian to kill her but that isn’t what he is after at all. Instead his aim is to destroy her life and remove everything that could possibly offer any emotional support or happiness. Eventually he escalates to assaulting others in such a way that she looks guilty and she is remanded into a psychiatric hospital. Every effort that she makes to reach out for help is turned against her and every time she uses a trick like scattering powder on the floor to catch him is punished by hurting the people she loves. Every claim that she makes that Adrian is alive and is behind all this only makes her sound crazier. This really is the most complete and extensive form of gaslighting that I’ve ever seen. As a clever touch, Adrian’s luxurious house and hi-tech lab has been deliberately designed to resemble that of Tony Stark from the MCU films. You can well imagine the horror of someone with immense wealth, connections and social status using all that to ruin one person’s life.

Unfortunately, the film isn’t satisfied with this straightforward but sound premise and tries too hard to tack on additional twists. After his plan to discredit Cecilia works so well, it makes no sense why he would shift to attacking her openly and hence reveal his existence, except that it provides an excuse to mount superhero-style action scenes. The motivation of Adrian’s brother to become involved doesn’t make sense at all and it’s hard to understand what they planned to achieve. It feels very much as if director Leigh Whannell doesn’t want the film to be limited to being a niche psychological horror film, even though it would have been excellent in that niche, and so tried to open it up to a wider mainstream audience. While it’s technically proficient and does become more action-packed, it amounts to a genre shift that completely abandons the reason for why it was so good before. Cecilia’s victory is unsatisfactory because she doesn’t beat Adrian at his own game. She wins only because he gives up on trying to be truly invisible to everyone else.

So this is a film that gets off to a promising start but it soon becomes clear that it really was intended to be a kind of superhero film all along and goes all out on the action. It would have been amazing if the psychological horror had been allowed to play to its conclusion as Cecilia struggles to convince everyone that she isn’t crazy, but this isn’t the case at all and so this ends up as being disappointing.