Spoiler alert: THE INVISIBLE MAN is one of my favorite movies of the year thus far in a year that’s been EXCEPTIONALLY strong (UNDERWATER, AFTER MIDNIGHT, GRETEL & HANSEL, motherfucking VFW, even SONIC THE HEDGEHOG have all rocked my socks off). The movie is tense, terrifying, and definitely surprising, and Elizabeth Moss turns in a brilliant performance. But that doesn’t mean the film is above criticism. While it didn’t stifle my enjoyment during the movie, only became a nit that nagged at me afterwards, there’s some double mumbo-jumbo in the movie and I think there didn’t have to be.
For those of you who haven’t read SAVE THE CAT, double mumbo-jumbo means that the script is asking the audience to accept more than one fantastical premise. The examples Blake Snyder uses aren’t great, so I’ll just create a hypothetical—imagine that in ALIENS, one of the Colonial Marines is a magic user. Single mumbo-jumbo is the Xenomorphs, but we can accept an alien like that in that world. But if you add in magic for some reason, we’re going to call bullshit.
THE INVISIBLE MAN asks us to accept the premise that a man can turn invisible, which isn’t all that far-fetched. But then it also asks us to accept the soap opera plot point of someone faking their death. Someone famous. And while occasionally people do try to fake their own death, it’s usually someone who’s not well-known who is facing some serious legal trouble—Samuel Israel III, for example. I have trouble believing that an Elon Musk-level tech celeb could get away with such a thing (and if you still think it would be easy for someone to do if they had enough money, why are mega-rich guys like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby sitting in prison when they could have faked their own deaths?).
And it’s not just that Adrian fakes his own death, he stages a suicide in a hotel room where he slits his wrists. If he’d disappeared at sea, okay, but a hotel? Think about it—the number of people who’d have to be in on the scheme is ridiculous. Adrian’s brother, sure, plus the hotel housekeeper who finds him, the EMTs, at minimum a couple uniformed officers and maybe some detectives, the coroner, the coroner’s assistant…that’s a lot of people to pay off and then trust not to tell their spouse, their priest or rabbi, or their friendly local bartender. Grand conspiracies usually fall apart under their own weight, because it’s demonstrably true that two can keep a secret when one of them is dead.
A quick fix to erase the double mumbo-jumbo would be for Adrian to be jailed, rather than fake his suicide. He could smuggle in his invisible tech, and continue to harass and stalk Cecilia. The plot point of people not believing her would work just fine, since her cop friend could even point to jailhouse CCTV footage that shows Adrian never leaving his cell. Sure, you lose the great urn gag in the brother’s office, but that’s the only thing that’s lost, and you’re not asking the audience to swallow too much fantastical stuff.