The traumatic power of Moss’s performance is that she acts out the convulsive desperation and rage of a woman who is being terrorized and, at the same time, totally not believed about it, even by those closest to her. That sounds like a standard hurdle the heroine of a sci-fi drama has to get over, only in this case the fact that everyone thinks Cecilia is seeing things - or, more to the point, seeing a tormenter she isn’t able to see - is the source of the film’s tingly, anguished resonance. But even they don’t buy what she’s saying. Cecilia, who’s crashing for a while at the home of her childhood friend, a courtly police officer named James (Aldis Hodge), and his high-school-senior daughter, Sydney (Storm Reid), makes a few fumbling attempts to explain what’s going on to them. But Whannell, who was James Wan’s original collaborator on the “Saw” and “Insidious” films, and who directed “Insidious: Chapter 3” and “Upgrade,” has something more pleasurably ambitious in mind.
It would be easy to imagine a version of this movie that’s nothing more than a slickly executed victim-meets-tormenter-you-can’t-see, cat-and-mouse action duel. The idea of the invisible man as an aggressive invader, on the other hand, a human monster who can strike at any moment, creates a highly charged set-up for fear and tension, and the new “Invisible Man” is a logistical mind-game suspense film staged with killer verve.
In James Whale’s famous 1933 poetic sci-fi horror film, the invisible man was a spectral presence, played by Claude Rains as a haunted but delicate figure swathed in bandages - one whose vanishing act was treated, in the end, as a kind of affliction.