The Victorian era. Adeline (Mhairi Calvey), the widow of an experimental scientist who never quite managed to come up with the great, humanity-improving invention he was angling for, has a bit of a bad time. Her husband spent much of their wealth on his experiments, and she is now in the final stages of pawning off whatever valuables she still has left to keep the her hubby’s manor house. The bank is apparently foreclosing on the mansion soon, as well. Her attempts to positively influence the political life of the small town she is living close to by realizing a genius welfare plan is thwarted by the conservative stuffiness of the men in power as well as the little influence women were allowed to have on the public life of their society.
So she’s rather well prepared by a quiet anger and desperation to accept the strange and the dubious when her old university friend Griffin (Mike Beckingham) appears at her home. Well, I say appears, but as a matter of fact, he’s invisible. Apparently, he has invented an invisibility serum and made himself thus, with no way of turning visible again. He desperately needs shelter away from the big city and a lab to find a way for an antidote for his invisibility formula – both things Adeline can provide. Griffin’s willing to pay for it, too, though Adeline quickly realizes that he doesn’t come by the money he gives her in an honest way. She’s desperate, though, and even if Griffin is stealing, he’s not exactly hitting men who don’t deserve to be put down a peg, and if he’s talking a bit too much about the power his invisibility provides him with, what of it?
Adeline manages to convince herself of Griffin’s basic harmlessness and moral fibre for quite some time, but eventually, his escalating brutality will make it impossible for her to look away forever.
Paul Dudbridge’s low budget version of the H.G. Wells novel is a surprisingly interesting little movie, using the material with a degree of thought and care I would not have expected. The film seems genuinely interested in Adeline’s position as an intelligent and independent woman in a time and place that respects these traits in a woman even less than is the case now, and her encounter with a man who appears to share her quiet anger at the world. The difference being that she wants a better world for everyone where he just wants to rule the world as it is. So yes, the film does put this interest in talking about things social into plot in a rather melodramatic manner, but then, what’s the fun in playing in the Victorian sandbox if you don’t.
Visually, Dudbridge is a bit of a conservative director, but there’s a steady, if unflashy competence that fits the movie well. The acting is generally strong, if a little stagy, but if a million BBC productions have taught us anything, that’s how people talked in the olden-ish times, so the staginess feels fitting and even curiously authentic. This acting approach certainly does work well with the earnest and dramatic tone of the film, unlike a more conventional naturalism would, and the leads, particularly Calvey, do seem to know when to let their backs relax a little.
The effects are not very good – even some of the invisibility moments that are basically a solved problem in filmmaking even without digital effects – but they are really not the point of the film, so I didn’t find it difficult to just accept what they are meant to represent and get on with the emphasis on ideas and characters this is centred on.
And there Fear the Invisible Man works rather well, leaving it a thoughtful and clever movie, where I expected fun nonsense going in.
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