Not Quite There

The Invisible

(PG-13)

originally published May 2, 2007

Justin Chatwin

The Invisible, adapted from Swedish novel Den Osynlige and the film of the same name, is a rather curious movie. Directed by David S. Goyer, the lower-tier comic movie god who wrote the Blade trilogy and Batman Begins (why the talented scribe left the screenwriting duties to writers Mick Davis and Christine Roum is more mysterious than the film), The Invisiblethrusts the audience into a strange teenage world quite unlike the reality known to most. For the first 30 minutes, I felt as if I'd mistakenly waltzed into a foreign film that was halfway over and lacking subtitles as I watched golden child Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin, War of the Worlds) sleepwalk through his perfect life and bad girl Annie Newton (former Russian gymnast Margarita Levieva) steal hers. Helping little to clear my confusion was the misleading trailer that implied Nick to be Annie's boyfriend and provided a creepy old geezer to explain the gravity of Nick's situation. In what the film rather loopily substitutes for reality, Annie is actually Nick's killer (don't worry; that's not a spoiler), and there's no expositional old guy. Once I'd recovered from the practical joke of a preview and settled into Goyer's bizarre, alternate reality (once Nick is attacked and the second act kicks in), I could acknowledge The Invisiblefor what it was, a solid, limited improvement over Goyer's last directorial effort.

Crisp, clear and cold, the picture is hard to categorize. Is The Invisiblea whodunit in which you know who did it or a fantastical teen drama hiding behind a thriller's mask? The plot may require the ghost of a dying Nick to solve his own attempted murder in order to live again, but the story cuts deeper into the divergent paths down which the death of a parent may lead. The loss of Nick's father pushed him to excel in order to escape the suffocating perfection of his mother (Marcia Gay Harden). Annie lost not only her mother but her moral compass and her desire to live; she constantly pushes those around her to the edge, hoping someone will push back hard enough to send her over the cliff. Unfortunately, The Invisibleshrouds its teens' motivations in so much cool indifference and dreary ennui that it plays like I Know What You Did Before Last Year's Graduation. Still, the flick stands out for some brilliantly executed same-shot trickery wherein the insubstantial Nick affects the world around him while not changing it at all. Broken windows replace themselves before the camera pans back around, and actors collect themselves from the floor to which Nick has knocked them without so much as missing a beat. If only Goyer the writer, not just Goyer the imaginative director, had shown up to work on the picture, The Invisible might have burned off its self-induced haze.

Drew Wheeler