The Invisible -- 2007 -- PG-13

What a cool premise. A guy wanders out of the woods after a bad night only to find no one can see or hear him. Is he dead? Is he a ghost? He thinks he is, but much to his surprise, he learns that the wait on this side of the afterlife is quite short...unless you’re still alive. So begins the race to find his body to save it before he dies and passes away entirely. Big problem, though. No one can see or hear him...no one, except one girl. But can he convince her he is real and to save him before it’s too late?

It’s very hard to talk much about this movie without giving too much away. When I read the blockbuster sleeve, in fact, it gave away a bit of the plot I didn’t want to know before hand. What I said above is what was in the trailer, and that’s about all I’ll give away. The plot, itself, runs a bit on the slow side. It tries to be a slow-burning fuse, but that only works if it attached to something that actually explodes. This one works to build, but fizzles out on a continual basis.

Our boy wanders the world, and reacts to it in a weird way. It’s like he is still in it, but not really, which is somewhat true. God, I love ambiguousness sometimes. The trouble is he seems to be able to pass through some objects, but not others. He has to open some doors, but at other times, he just appears in rooms with people. He seems to have to find people, but at other times, he can just be by their side. It’s an inconsistency you want to forgive because "he’s a ghost," but based on his interactions, find it difficult to let go of.

When it comes to characters, our main couple is fairly well drawn. We understand who they are, their family life, their ambitions, what brought them to where they are, why they do what they do. It’s very refreshing to find so much work put into these people. Everyone around them was filled out to a much, much lesser extent. You have a basic idea who everyone else is, but they are clearly only bit players and receive about that much attention too. Their existence is there to fill key plot points, and then they are let go of almost completely.

The ending rings very bitter-sweet, and it can be argued that it could not have gone any other way, although as an audience, we would definitely want it to end differently. The climactic scene where everything was building to only served to give us the final fizzle as all the momentum comes to a grinding halt while our little couple gets their moments to eek out the final bits of plot to close the film. It takes a film with questionable believability to begin with (it’s a ghost story), and drives us right out of the moment with a contrived bit that lacks the punch it is intended to provide.

On the one hand, I liked the movie. I enjoyed how it unfolded, and how, in a Hitchcockian way, we actually know almost everything and everyone placing us in a superior position to the characters involved. The problem is, this knowledge is not used in a suspenseful way, leaving us to watch as these characters just play out their story as we expect them to, instead of throwing any surprises or twists at us. Would I recommend a watching of it? Sure, it has its moments, and I’ll admit that I did enjoy the ride, but it’s not something worth watching more than once.