'The Invisible Man': When Danger Is Present — And Clear
Leigh Whannell's update of the H.G. Wells novel traffics in a "psychological realism that's unusual for the genre," which effectively transforms it into "Gaslight with a horror twist."
Of the Universal classic monsters — Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, et al. — The Invisible Man is by far the most destructive, the most psychotic, and, not coincidentally, the most recognizably human of them all. (As played by Claude Rains, he's also the wittiest.) When a man doesn't have to look at himself in the mirror, he divorces himself from the moral accountability that curbs his worst instincts. Arrogance and contempt are his defining character traits, and invisibility
