The Invisible (2007)

I don't remember exactly when I've seen "The Invisible" for the first time, but it probably was more than 13 years ago, before writing my first blog entry. At that moment I liked it a lot. My memory is not so good though to write based on that impression, but I've refound it on TV recently, by chance. What I can say after my 2nd watch is that either my standards went up a lot, or it's harder for me to get impressed by drama, but even so I still find a movie a bit underrated.

What we have here is a mix-up between a teen romance and a thriller, with drama accents that you can feel (spoiler) in not the most happy ending ever. Nick Powell is a fresh high-school graduate, coming from a wealthy family, aspiring towards a career as a writer, and willing to escape from his mother's close watch to continue his studies in London. At the same school, Annie Newton has the complete opposite profile: poor disfunctional family, a bunch of unorthodox activities in order to make some money: from loan sharking to stealing cars and others, and a future that most likely looks to lead behind bars. The paths of the two intersect after Annie is denounced by her boyfriend pissed of being cut off from the spoils of a jewelery robbery, but somehow Nick ends up as the one suspected of informing the police. So, Annie decides to pay the "bill" helped by her partners in crime, and Nick ends up in a coma, thrown at the bottom of a sewer and becoming "the invisible". Precisely, he's trapped somewhere between life and death, giving him the opportunity to walk among the living and to observe what he left behind, until he becomes aware that he's still alive. After that we're getting in a race to save his life, where, predictable enough, the role of who brought him to this state shifts completely.

The movie is a remake of a Swedish production, which I didn't see and it might be better. Here, the target is clearly set somewhere similar to "Twilight", released during the same years. Probably this age range contributed also to why I liked it better when I've seen it first, despite being already older than this target. Indeed, I can't deny now that are many parts where the story is at least hardly believable. Besides that, the approach for the SciFi part is very... "economic" let's call it, in the sense that pretty much all Nick's interactions with the environment in his "ectoplasmic" state are presented as effectively taking place, with a sort of flashback succession where nothing really happened. Given the potential confusion degree of the approach, I'd say that the movie is very well edited. Still, you can't deny that some VFX might have been more.. natural in this context. Probably all these lead to the low rating it has on pretty much all the movie sites it's indexed on. However, the movie has something in how it's put together so that if you can ignore the above, it builds up an emotional load that grows on you until the end. It's either that, or the fact that when I've watched it for the first time I had an instant crush for Margarita Levieva who has the leading part of Annie :), or it just has a nostalgia effect for years with less stress, but for me it's still something like a...

Rating: 4 out of 5