Streaming: gaslighting films that will have you doubting your sanity

The Invisible Man, now available to stream, is the latest in cinema’s chilling tradition of psychodramas, from Gaslight to The Girl on the Train

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.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2CGq6VH