Review: Invisible

Invisible begins with an interminable car ride. Ostensibly driving to their vacation getaway, Joseph (James Tupper) makes the mistake of asking his wife Jane (Kit Pongetti) for directions when he can’t remember if the exit they need to get off on is 115 or 151. Sounds like dyslexia to me, but Jane’s response suggests that Joseph’s real problem is his male ego. For almost half of the film’s running time, composer Steven Bias drenches the film in impossibly relentless mood music while director Adam Watsein soaks up the scenery, returning from time to time to see if Joseph and Jane are still at it. “Are you trying to prove something?” she asks, to which he replies, “Why do you always have to criticize me?” We could be here forever given their propensity for answering questions with more questions, but luckily they finally get out of the car. This, though, is not before Joseph almost runs over a man at a gas station, and Jane, after watching a number of ducks skate across the surface of a lake, wonders where the rest of the family went (“They’re always together,” she intones), at which point this bad relationship drama begins to pick up a glaring transmission from Michael Haneke’s canon. When Joseph begins to see the man he almost ran over, it’s unclear if he is hallucinating, but when Bobby (Joe Mellis) and his brother Bep (David Mogentale), both mentally whacked, hold Joseph and Jane hostage in their home and go on about the couple being the parents that abused them, it becomes clear that this is one of those inane thrillers that wants us to believe that this horrible experience, metaphorical or not, will be enough for Joseph and Jane to put all their problems behind them. To its credit, the film looks as if it was shot in more than one day, but Watsein’s experiment in terror is a futile one.