Crew
Director/Story – Andrew Currie, Screenplay – Colin Aussant & Andrew Currie, Producers – Lee Kim & Mary Ann Waterhouse, Photography – Maya Bankovic, Music – Todor Kobakov, Visual Effects Supervisor – Chris Ross, Visual Effects – Hadron VFX Inc., Special Effects – Storm FX, Production Design – Rupert Lazarus. Production Company – Quadrant Motion Pictures/Resolute Films/Metro International Entertainment/Telefilm Canada/Ontario Creates/Rainmaker Films.
Cast
Tim Blake Nelson (Charlie Fisher), Gretchen Mol (Hanna Fisher), Bruce Greenwood (Carl Green), Simon Webster (Oskar Fisher), Nathan Alexis (Nick Cheechoo), Vinson Tran (Leonard), Philip Van Martin (Blaine), Tal Gottfried (Arwin), Rob Ramsey (Jimmy), Rachel Dolan (Grace), Juno Rinaldi (Franny), Eileen Li (Carol Sings), Rachel Wilson (Kara), Laura Di Carteret (Amy), Courtney Stevens (Arthur), Golden Madison (Petra), Raven Dauda (Denise)
Plot
Charlie Fisher is an insurance executive and is married to Hanna. He is disappointed when he is passed over for a promotion that he was expecting to receive. As consolation, he is to be sent to Phoenix on a training mission. That evening he finds that his hands are fading away. He wakes in the morning to find that neither Hanna nor anybody in the street or at work can see him. He then encounters Nick, someone who can see him. Nick introduces Charlie to a bar where several other Invisibles who have also faded away and cannot be seen have created a community. Charlie then encounters Oskar, his son who died in an accident, and starts to discover the relationship he never had with him.
Andrew Currie is a Canadian director. After a couple of other films, Currie gained some attention with the likeable Billy Connolly-starring zombie comedy Fido (2006). Subsequent to that, Currie went on to make the horror film Barricade (2012) and the non-genre comedy The Steps (2015). The Invisibles was Currie’s sixth film.
There have been plenty of films on the subject of Invisibility ever since The Invisible Man (1933). Most of the works that followed had the invisibility occur due to some scientific process – usually a formula, cosmic rays in the case of Fantastic Four’s Invisible Woman, occasionally a magical process such as The One Ring in various Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit tellings or a cloak in the legend of Siegfried.
Much more rare are a series of works where invisibility is more of a social process. The work that The Invisibles most resembles is Above the Shadows (2019) where Olivia Thirlby seems to just fade out of existence and become invisible to other people. There are also some similarities to David S. Goyer’s The Invisible (2007) where Justin Chatwin becomes a disembodied spirit after falling into a coma – we get similar scenes here where people try to affect physical objects and end up picking up copies of them.
The Invisibles has an intriguingly original premise. It becomes fascinating to find out how this new world that Tim Blake Nelson finds himself in works and then the discovery of the Secret Society of other Invisibles that is based out of an abandoned bar-combined-bowling-alley-and-pool-hall. You watch various scenes with Tim Blake Nelson finding he can pick up someone’s food and receive a copy of it but one that has little taste, or when he throws about and smashes a painting in wife Gretchen Mol’s office and all that she finds is that the painting on the wall has tilted slightly. And then his discovery that he can affect some things in his workplace.
At the same time as you are wanting to find out more about the world we are in, The Invisibles introduces the kid (Simon Webster) just before the halfway point. The film then becomes a completely different one, no longer about Tim Blake Nelson’s invisible condition and the world of The Invisibles. What we instead get is a story about Tim Blake Nelson reconciling with his dead son – it is not clear if Oskar is a ghost or an Imaginary Companions as the film does nothing to explain how the kid came to return. Certainly, a story of a father reconciling with his son is a far less interesting than what you started watching the film about where it feels as though The Invisibles is abandoning its most imaginative possibilities. This is certainly the case by the time of a perfunctory ending where Tim Blake Nelson just wakes up and is visible once again.
Trailer here