Leigh Whannell
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Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)
Directed by Joseph Ruben
influenced The Invisible Man (2020)
Plot Visuals Themes
Touches of Sleeping With the Enemy (1991) and Hollow Man (2000) aside, Whannell’s rebirth of The Invisible Man feels like a fresh take blending the most minimal of threads from H.G. Wells‘ novel with more urgent themes from today.
In the movie’s breathtaking opening (one seemingly modeled after “Sleeping With the Enemy”), she carefully, with disgust on her face, lifts the hand draped over her in bed.
One is a thriller about escaping an abusive relationship, in the vein of Sleeping with the Enemy or Enough .
The result is a film that is less like Hollow Man (though there are some similar and less convincing visual effects at play) and more akin to Sleeping With the Enemy with the paranoia and trauma cranked to 100 as it focuses on the long-lived affects of gaslighting and abuse.
The narrative is a mix of Sleeping with the Enemy , The Entity and Hollow Man .
The terrors of escaping from an abusive relationship have been depicted in films before—there are similarities here to 1991’s Sleeping with the Enemy—but the unknowns that underpin so much of this film make its themes come alive.
Hollow Man (2000)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
influenced The Invisible Man (2020)
Plot Themes Visuals
Touches of Sleeping With the Enemy (1991) and Hollow Man (2000) aside, Whannell’s rebirth of The Invisible Man feels like a fresh take blending the most minimal of threads from H.G. Wells‘ novel with more urgent themes from today.
The result is a film that is less like Hollow Man (though there are some similar and less convincing visual effects at play) and more akin to Sleeping With the Enemy with the paranoia and trauma cranked to 100 as it focuses on the long-lived affects of gaslighting and abuse.
We’ve come a long way from the era of wrapping actors up in gauze, or Kevin Bacon digitized in “Hollow Man” (which is actually a pretty good flick) - “The Invisible Man” is a welcome addition to the horror remake canon, and a refreshing reminder that seeing is believing.
The narrative is a mix of Sleeping with the Enemy , The Entity and Hollow Man .
The word of the day is hyper-realism, to create fantastical situations that seem plausible enough, instead of men wearing rolls of toilet paper/bandages or unconvincing sera like in the 1990s clunker version of the story, “Hollow Man,” starring Elizabeth Shue and Kevin Bacon.
Of course, given the title and the various iterations of H.G. Wells' famous story that have come and gone over the decades -- including Paul Verhoeven's "Hollow Man" from 2000 that upped the ante in terms of R-rated brutality -- we know the titular character (whoever he or she may be) is likely going to prove that Cecilia's issues are more than just mental manifestations.
The Terminator (1984)
Directed by James Cameron
influenced Upgrade (2018), The Invisible Man (2020)
Themes Visuals
Clearly influenced by films like The Terminator, Videodrome, The Matrix, RoboCop, and there may even be a little bit of Johnny Mnemonic in there as well (hey, a girl can dream, can’t she?), Whannell transports us into the future where technology has taken over nearly ever facet of our lives, but Grey Trace (Marshall-Green) still clings to his analog-loving existence by working on classic cars and expressing his desire to make pizza from scratch.
The writer-director, Leigh Whannell , a key member of the “Saw” and “Insidious” franchise teams (though this is only the second feature he’s directed, after “Insidious 3”), would probably be perfectly happy if you watched his movie and name-checked all the influences he’s vacuumed into it, from “The Hidden” to “Ex Machina” to “The Terminator.”
The distinction between Grey and Grey while under control is methodically crafted, giving the body robotic movements and precise command over joints similar to much of the fight choreography in The Matrix franchise (this comes as less of a surprise once you remember that Leigh Whannell actually had a minor role in the series and is no doubt also drawing inspiration from working on that set alongside his own self-professed influences such as The Terminator), all stylishly flavored with swirling camera movements and an edgy hard rock soundtrack that fits with the gnarly brutality from every death on the checklist of generic villains.
He proves to be a good student of the genre—hardly a scene goes by that doesn’t play as a shout-out to some film or another, ranging from the obvious like “Robocop” and “The Terminator” to titles whose very mention would probably be considered spoilers—but when it comes to understanding why those movies worked, he is on less sure footing.
Upgrade is a film that, like James Cameron’s The Terminator before it, shows that humankind is perhaps a bit too dependent on technology.
That such '80s-era films as The Terminator and Robocop were an inspiration becomes instantly apparent in the latest directorial effort from Leigh Whannell (veteran of the Saw and Insidious franchises).
There are echoes of Ingrid Bergman in this performance – not only from Gaslight but from Notorious.
There are parallels here to the classic 1944 film "Gaslight," about a man who bullies and manipulates his wife into thinking that she is going crazy.
Following their doubts, an abused partner eventually stands up to their abuser to the audience’s satisfaction: see 1944’s Gaslight to 2002’s Enough , with many other examples in between and beyond.
Moss plays Cecilia Kass, the abused partner of a controlling tech entrepreneur who is developing advanced optics technology—and apparently watching 1944’s Gaslight on his down time.
No one believes her that her dead, invisible, abusive ex-boyfriend is pulling off the greatest gaslighting job since Charles Boyer in "Gaslight."
Touches of Sleeping With the Enemy (1991) and Hollow Man (2000) aside, Whannell’s rebirth of The Invisible Man feels like a fresh take blending the most minimal of threads from H.G. Wells‘ novel with more urgent themes from today.
With a few cheeky nods to James Whale’s 1933 Universal horror classic, The Invisible Man is a remake that pays homage to its predecessor while blazing its own wildly original path.
Though there’s no specifically sexual violence, The Invisible Man has a lot of spiritual kinship with rape-and-revenge movies like I Spit on Your Grave.
Though more than eighty years have passed since Claude Rains donned the dark sunglasses, smoking jacket, and yards of ACE bandages in 1933’s The Invisible Man , the character still holds a firm place in the pantheon of Universal’s classic movie monsters.
Some scenes remind of Bernard Rose's Candyman --the wrong-man intrigue (and Whannell makes a clever reference to Thornhill's U.N. trouble from North by Northwest ) resulting in institutionalization.
She’s manipulated and gaslit at every turn, and I was reminded at times of Candyman , Bernard Rose’s chiller in which a woman has the damnedest time convincing everyone around her that an urban legend is very much alive.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Directed by James Cameron
influenced The Invisible Man (2020)
Plot Characters
Little wonder we eventually get an extended segment in a maximum security/treatment facility with strong echoes of “Terminator 2.” Cecilia’s claims about an invisible menace sound as crazy as Sarah Connor’s story of a cyborg killer from the future.
By the end of this weekend, everyone will have compared The Invisible Man to Terminator 2, but just because a point is common doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Cecilia's journey likewise mirrors that of Sarah Connor's in Terminator 2 : the woman no one believes running from a technological peril of which only she is aware.
Natch, there’s a fly in the ointment – corporate espionage, bottom lines and more that drive the bigger picture, and themes right out of “Frankenstein” or “Blade Runner” (1982) – but it’s all a device for Grey to tap into his inner HAL and hack up henchmen, some of whom have guns implanted in their arms; one who can sneeze deadly spores.
First up, it's a near-future, cyberpunk-tinged tale, which (bar Blade Runner and The Matrix) has a spotty track record at the box office.
Sure, it’s got your dime-a-dozen Blade Runner cyberpunk debris (holograms, drones flying over city streets), but production designer Felicity Abbott infuses these objects with an organic sensibility that furthers the film’s thematic intermixing of the natural and artificial.
Upgrade zips along like a version of the original Blade Runner on speed (it even has a futuristic detective segment utilizing security camera footage) as the structure is as simple as tracking down each man responsible for the attacks one by one, but honestly, that’s all the movie needs.
Directed by Leigh Whannell (co-creator of Saw, Insidious, and lots more) with a whole lot of zing, it’s sort of like a tragic film noir combined with dashes of Blade Runner, RoboCop, and Death Wish.
You could argue the Hitchcock influence is more derivative than homage, given the sheer volume of references and techniques Whannell (Upgrade) borrows from the cinematic master, particularly from Vertigo.
Relocated to San Francisco (the most paranoid of cities thanks to movies like Vertigo , Invasion of the Body Snatchers , and Zodiac ) and holed up with Cecilia’s cop friend James (Aldis Hodge) and his college-bound daughter Sydney (Storm Reid), Cecilia harbors justifiable fears that Adrian will find her hiding place.
Not to sound too hyperbolic, but often, The Invisible Man reminded me of Jaws, how Steven Spielberg, with a few notes of music and a few edits, could evoke real tension and fear.
There’s something of Spielberg’s Jaws in Whannell’s method (albeit without the technical skill).
Adrian is as much the shark from “Jaws” or Michael Myers from “Halloween,” as he is a “Sleeping with the (Invisible) Enemy” or “When A(n invisible) Stranger Calls” stalker; bridging a force of nature and a deeply human expression of malice.
Steven Spielberg tapped into this fear by not showing audiences the shark in “Jaws,” just close-ups and the camera from the point of view of the creature.
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Directed by John Landis
influenced Wolf Man (2025)
Visuals Themes
Although the prosthetics here are technically impressive, the overall wolf design is so torn between paying homage to Lon Chaney Jr’s original and avoiding any similarity to the pinnacle of the genre, An American Werewolf in London (1981), that the result looks oddly like one of those deep-sea blobfish.
Anyone who goes back long enough to remember the eye-opening thrills at the time of the visceral transformations in Joe Dante's The Howling or John Landis' An American Werewolf in London — Rob Bottin and Rick Baker really were groundbreaking effects wizards back in 1981 — might judge the latest iteration to be low on fresh juice.
Aside from An American Werewolf in London (1981), there really is no classic werewolf film.
But the werewolf is arguably one of the least popular of the silver screen monsters of late, at least since the entertaining An American Werewolf in London (1981). And with Wolf Man, Blumhouse tries to give this classic monster an emotional makeover.
Paranormal Activity (2007)
Directed by Oren Peli
influenced The Invisible Man (2020), Upgrade (2018)
Themes Visuals
If the “Paranormal Activity” and “Insidious” franchises are rather silly, they also have released solid efforts like “Sinister,” “Get Out,” as well as “The Purge” franchise.
Writer/director Leigh Whannell ("Saw," "Upgrade") aces adapting H.G. Wells’ nineteenth century novel for the modern #MeToo age as a paranoid thriller, low budget effects à la “Paranormal Activity” effecting big chills, Elizabeth Moss excelling as a woman with only herself to turn to.
It’s horror on a psychological, “always watching” level that pulls from Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (early mind games) to Whannell’s own Upgrade (later action sequences).
As he showed us in Paranormal Activity , Whannell knows that the root of fear and horror lies in the things we don’t see rather than from those we do.
Like the malevolent demons of Blumhouse‘s signature Paranormal Activity franchise, he remains mostly an unseen, evil force messing with his ex’s mind.
And the “evidence” of Cecilia’s unseen stalker is mostly relegated to simple, practical effects that would not be out of place in a Paranormal Activity movie, but that only makes Cecilia’s plight more traumatic.
In the end, the clear borrowing from the great, snarky original 1987 “RoboCop” (near-future cityscape and all) almost overpowers “Upgrade.”
The ghosts of “eXistenZ” (1999) and “The Terminator” (1984) may linger at its edges, but Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” (1987) is the most obvious influence haunting “Upgrade,” whether one’s comparing their social commentaries or a parallel fascination with matters of the steel and flesh.
It’s not a scattershot approach, per se; what it is, is deliberately weird, pulling signifiers from a range of nominally similar films (Robocop, say, or Videodrome, or even the notably more sunny Robot & Frank) but deploying them in ways that keep the viewer off kilter.
There are echoes of Ingrid Bergman in this performance – not only from Gaslight but from Notorious.
Bit by bit, however, Whannell attentively cranks up the tension, and his principal vehicle for that is Cecilia, whose moments of lucidity and positive intent become increasingly dominated by degrees of disorientation and general out-of-it-ness in ways that remind of some Hitchcock heroines, notably Ingrid Bergman in Notorious .
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Upgrade (2018)
Dialogue Plot Characters Visuals Music
And he sounds just like Douglas Rain's deadpan delivery as HAL 9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Welcome to Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade, a cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Robocop , and also uniquely its own thing.
It’s a computer that reconnects his mind to his body, and also fuses with his body, so that Grey can become an invincible fighting machine, his limbs controlled by programming (at least, when he wants them to be) and the voice of STEM talking directly to him, inside his skull, in tones of gentle resolve that are clearly designed to remind you of HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey” (though he sounds like a HAL who just graduated from a Tony Robbins seminar).
Allowed to wallow in a grime that owes as much to Death Wish and RoboCop as it does 2001: A Space Odyssey, Whannell and Jason Blum’s low budget but high ambition mostly serves up gleeful and sadistic thrills.
But the set pieces are excellent, especially once Trace and STEM interface; imagine HAL 9000 and Dr. Bowman from “2001: A Space Odyssey” in a buddy cop movie.
The chip, called “STEM,” also speaks to Grey, in a voice similar to that of HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
The narrative is a mix of Sleeping with the Enemy , The Entity and Hollow Man .
No one will listen to Cecilia, and everyone thinks she is suffering a mental breakdown – until she either is left with “no choice” but to learn to live with her persecutor’s domineering aggression (like the protagonist of Sidney J. Furie’s in many ways similar The Entity , 1982), or else start to turn the tables on her oppressor and take back some control (in the process perhaps becoming a monster herself).
Unsane (2018)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
influenced The Invisible Man (2020)
Characters Themes Plot
Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale) is outstandingly credible in the lead role and I’m reminded of the equally impressive performance from Claire Foy in Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane.
The film is also inspired by Polanski’s Repulsion and Soderbergh’s Unsane .
Claire Foy tried it, for example, in “Unsane.”
Whannell’s Invisible Man is rooted in the tradition of films like Gaslight—from which the term “gaslighting” derives—Wait Until Dark, Suspiria, and more recently, Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, as it uses horror conventions to weave a dark tale of fear, paranoia, doubt, and what it’s like to be a woman whom nobody believes.
When she’s set up for murder, Cecilia’s locked down in a mental institution where she shares space with someone only she knows is there (shades of Steven Soderbergh’s “Unsane”).
Soderbergh’s Unsane (2018) and Justin Edgar’s Stalked (2019), Whannell’s film confidently updates the source material not just in terms of its science, but also in terms of its gender politics, repurposing the barebones of Wells’s premise as a potent metaphor for what we so often fail or even refuse to see in the power relationships between men and women.
No longer a passive spectator to her life, it becomes an active participant in it, recalling the vicious killer-camera used by the Peeping Tom in Michael Powell’s 1960 horror classic.
Invoking the classic serial-killer POV of Peeping Tom , the camera stalks Cecilia with long shots and from behind doorways, creating menace with negative space to the point where the frame itself becomes the villain.
Merge the hyper-stylized combat sequences from "The Matrix" with headier elements from sci-fi's "Colossus: The Forbin Project," add a crimson splash of David Cronenberg's "Videodrome" and you'd roughly get "Upgrade."
And it's a surprisingly effective mashup of several genres -- superhero (à la Unbreakable ), sci-fi (in the neighborhood of The Matrix and Ex Machina ), revenge (think Death Wish or The Crow ), comedy ( All of Me ), and horror (more for the gore than anything else).
Clearly influenced by films like The Terminator, Videodrome, The Matrix, RoboCop, and there may even be a little bit of Johnny Mnemonic in there as well (hey, a girl can dream, can’t she?), Whannell transports us into the future where technology has taken over nearly ever facet of our lives, but Grey Trace (Marshall-Green) still clings to his analog-loving existence by working on classic cars and expressing his desire to make pizza from scratch.
First up, it's a near-future, cyberpunk-tinged tale, which (bar Blade Runner and The Matrix) has a spotty track record at the box office.
The distinction between Grey and Grey while under control is methodically crafted, giving the body robotic movements and precise command over joints similar to much of the fight choreography in The Matrix franchise (this comes as less of a surprise once you remember that Leigh Whannell actually had a minor role in the series and is no doubt also drawing inspiration from working on that set alongside his own self-professed influences such as The Terminator), all stylishly flavored with swirling camera movements and an edgy hard rock soundtrack that fits with the gnarly brutality from every death on the checklist of generic villains.
I’m talking *hard* sci-fi, with callbacks to anything from eXistenZ to The Matrix to Minority Report.
In terms of re-imagining a classic monster movie, this is perhaps the most drastic departure from its inspiration since David Cronenberg’s The Fly, which retained only the skeleton of the original.
Some of the best horror films are those that take otherworldly scenarios and graft them onto current events – think of They Live and its reaction to Reaganomics; Night of the Living Dead ‘s unspoken reflection on racism in America; or David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly and its relation to the AIDS epidemic.