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Review of The Invisible Man (Benjamin Wallfisch)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... for Benjamin Wallfisch's hypnotically gorgeous suspense material for piano and lushly mixed strings, the rapturous finale a magnificent expression of triumph.

Avoid it... if these attractive moments cannot transcend the truly awful electronic and marginally effective filler material in the score, the two halves of the work too incongruous to function together.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

The Invisible Man: (Benjamin Wallfisch) As part of Universal Pictures' resurrection of the classic monster movies, 2020's The Invisible Man abandons the studio's original intent to directly connect the narratives of their properties and instead treat them as individual stories. In this case, the concept of H. G. Wells' 1897 tale is twisted into a contemporary technological realm, replacing the chemical origins of the titular character's capabilities with an optically enhanced body suit that can render anyone in it invisible. It's a cheap modernization to force a classic idea into the slasher movie genre, the supposed protagonist revealed to be just as sick as the invisible man and leaving her own trail of blood by the end. Perhaps this diminishment should not be unexpected, as writer and director Leigh Whannell was an original conjurer of the grotesque Saw franchise. While critics and audiences rewarded the film well in the weeks prior to 2020's pandemic shutdown of theatres, The Invisible Man is a film that lacks any more elegance than the typical psychological murder thriller involving a scared woman and demented ex-partner. No stranger to both the horror and thriller genres is composer Benjamin Wallfisch, whose work in this area has tended to stray towards the dramatism that Christopher Young often infused into equivalent projects of the 1990's. While the young woman targeted by the invisible man in this story is not without her own homicidal tendencies, the film does attempt to treat her as a genuine heroine, and Wallfisch approached her as such as well. The composer supplies her a pained and tortured but romantic musical persona throughout the story, using the score to anchor her sanity. The most important aspect of the music for The Invisible Man is its relative brevity; Wallfisch thankfully left several scenes unscored at the behest of Whannell, and those moments benefit greatly from that choice. The music can be divided into three extremely distinct parts: the largely tonal string orchestra representing the heroine, the hyper-aggressive synthetic tones and manipulation for her ex-partner in the invisibility suit, and the more generic suspense material for both elements during mostly the film's middle third. The score as a whole is extraordinarily disjointed, content to convey two totally disparate sounds for good and evil without any truly effective merging of those halves, even when the suspense portions attempt to apply manipulation effects to the string orchestra.

Wallfisch has confessed that Bernard Herrmann was the inspiration for his approach to The Invisible Man, opting for the string-only orchestra because of Herrmann's proficiency creating tension with just those players. How that explains the electronic half of this score is beyond reason, however, as the orchestral passages are indeed quite adept at the task. In fact, Wallfisch's application of piano and strings for the heroine and the suit itself is nothing less than fantastic, the composer truly succeeding at achieving that Herrmann sound. His meandering piano line for the suit and ascending cello theme for the woman masterfully intertwine in "He's Gone" for the first time, the woman's theme debuting at 1:00 and the suit's motif at 1:25. While Wallfisch cites Psycho as the direct inspiration here, the better match is Herrmann's Cape Fear, the rhythmically hypnotic patterns able to be emphasized with significant variances in emotion as both wonder and suspense necessitate. In that regard, the better contemporary sibling for this score is Jerry Goldsmith's The Haunting, especially in the descending lines of mystery in cues like "Make It Rain" and "Why Me." By the climax, however, Wallfisch takes that Goldsmith technique of suspenseful romanticism and bloats it to Basic Instinct levels. The effect is arguably overblown by the final scene of the film, though it is among the more compelling recordings of the composer's career. The genesis of this material for Wallfisch existed in flashes during his It scores and, more substantively, The Cure for Wellness. After its introduction in "He's Gone," the woman and suit themes return late in "Make It Rain," where the suit motif dominates, and "Why Me," in which the cello for the woman again struggles against that motif. A highlight of the score is "The Suit," in which the woman discovers her ex-partner's toy for the first time and activates it. Here, Wallfisch transfers the suit motif from the piano to the full strings for a lushly immense and tonal expression of intrigue. Tortured interplay between these ideas occupies "It's All a Lie" and "Surprise," the suit's motif asserting itself better. In "Denouement," however, the composer takes the lush depth of "The Suit" and applies it the woman's theme to give it a massively satisfying sense of accomplishment. While the cue is magnificent, the extended shot of the woman's face at that final moment is laughably ridiculous on screen as Wallfisch milks the moment for every ounce of drama. The "Denouement" cue continues over the end credits, solo performances of the woman's cello theme and the ensemble string idea for the suit closing the score.

Unfortunately, as compelling as the orchestral highlights of The Invisible Man may be, Wallfisch's electronic portions are unlistenable both in the film and on album. It's unusual for such a strategic error to cause so much distraction in the film, but it does here. For the invisible man (the ex-partner) and his actions, Wallfisch uses heavily manipulated electronic tones. In "Escape," a scene otherwise powerful in its absence of music, the cue's explosions of pure noise are unnecessary and annoying. The same techniques apply to "Attack," "He's Behind You," and "House Fight;" the strings do join in with vague chopping at times. These are wretchedly terrible cues, especially on album, where they have abrupt volume drop-offs to passages of inaudible synthetic ambience between outright blasts of ear-bombing. The third type of music in the score is the hybrid suspense, as in "Cobolt" and "Asylum." When this material maintains the integrity of the organic recording, as in "This is What He Does," "We've Got That in Common," and "It's All a Lie," it remains effective. By the time the woman uses the suit to conduct her own revenge killing, Wallfisch favors the orchestra rather than the electronics for the occasion. Had the composer taken this stance throughout the entire picture, The Invisible Man could have been an outstanding score. Herrmann didn't need to use cheap tricks to supply the outlandish fantasy horror element; he incorporated specialty instruments, of course, but he did not abandon the base orchestral sound. The same could be said of Goldsmith, and that was the trick to their success. For the two halves of this score to coexist, and for the heroine to eventually become the killer in the suit by the end, the musical transformation had to develop out of common ground between the two halves of the music. And that simply wasn't possible because they were too disparate by nature to intermingle at the end, especially given the magnificent mix of the string layers alone. Wallfisch handles this problem by simply pushing the orchestral portion to the max, with a few obnoxious manipulations thrown in as an attempt to address the evolution. Playing with synthetic manipulations of obnoxious noises is not impressive nor really all that effective in 2020's filmmaking. Twisting those noises into the realm of suspenseful, tonal romance or, conversely, forcing the orchestra to organically supply the same discord of the electronics is where the answer lies. Otherwise, the transformation at the end has only a partial musical foundation of reference. As it is, Wallfisch's The Invisible Man is hypnotically gorgeous and gratingly repulsive all in one, forcing the listener to edit together 15 to 20 minutes of the score's more effective half on album for a worthwhile tribute to the suspense masters.  ***

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 49:32

• 1. Cobolt (1:42) • 2. Escape (4:28) • 3. He's Gone (3:37) • 4. This is What He Does (2:19) • 5. We've Got That in Common (1:21) • 6. Make It Rain (2:22) • 7. Attack (2:46) • 8. Why Me (3:00)

• 9. The Suit (2:15) • 10. Asylum (3:31) • 11. He's Behind You (4:42) • 12. House Fight (5:34) • 13. It's All a Lie (5:26) • 14. Surprise (1:32) • 15. Denouement (4:57)

NOTES & QUOTES:

There exists no official packaging for this album.

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