As humans, we cannot help but look for patterns, but sometimes the universe makes it easier than others. For example, we may have noticed two high-profile horror releases from February. We might have also noticed that the films were anchored by their lead actresses and received solid reviews from horror and non-horror journalists alike. But what makes the releases of Leigh Whannell’s “The Invisible Man” and Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz’s “The Lodge” so special is their respective explorations of gaslighting and the emotional abuse that women suffer at the hands of manipulative men.
In “The Lodge,” Riley Keough plays Grace, the sole survivor of a suicide cult who is trying to find happiness in her relationship with a true-crime scholar. Unfortunately for her, the sudden death of her fiance’s ex-wife has left her soon-to-be stepchildren scarred, and a long weekend in the countryside proves not to be the relationship-building experience she had hoped for. In “The Invisible Man,” Elisabeth Moss’ Cecilia is stalked by her brilliant and sadistic ex-husband, who is obsessed with the notion of reclaiming that which he believes belongs to him. As Cecilia struggles to share her suspicions with her friends, she soon finds herself the victim of a sustained and targeted bout of invisible abuse.
READ MORE: ‘The Invisible Man’: A Well-Crafted Horror With Some Very Visible Flaws [Review]
For those skeptical about the depiction of cultural trends in film, two films about gaslighting released in the same month must seem a bit much. Part of this is our fault. Since the term entered the culture mainstream over the past few years, its edges have been dulled with use. What we forget—and what the horror genre tried so hard to remind us in February—is that gaslighting is a particularly sinister act of emotional abuse. Those who write on the condition include among its effects isolation from loved ones, reduced decision-making skills, and even anxiety or depression. This opens the door to cinematic treatments far more sobering than the Hallmark movie of the week.
Katie Walsh, a film critic for the Tribune News Service and the Los Angeles Times, knows the parallels between horror and gaslighting better than most. Walsh spent several years in an emotionally abusive relationship, and the uncertainty she was made to feel by her partner parallels the uncertainty found in the best horror films.
“A film needs to be able to tackle a shattered reality and interpersonal betrayal in order [to] express the experience of gaslighting,” Walsh explains, “and because horror engages with the boundaries of reality, it is already equipped to do so.”
The concept of interpersonal betrayal is essential to both “The Lodge” and “The Invisible Man.” For one, each film is surprisingly quick to tip their hand to the audience. We know going into the film that Cecilia’s experiences are not just in her head. “The Lodge” also chooses not to wait until the last moment for its crazy/not-crazy twist to be resolved. In both of these films, the reality affected by the abusive male characters is not just in the heroine’s head, but also in her relationships with other characters. The betrayal these characters experience is magnified when their supposed loved ones reject their attempts to make sense of their emotional suffering.
Understandably, this puts the onus on the two lead individual performances to convey a complex set of emotions. “The Lodge” and “The Invisible Man” are acting showcases for Keough and Moss. Each film focuses on their internal life—the fears, doubts, and anxieties that accompany them into every situation—and both films demand that they sell their past abuses without ever making the implicit explicit.
“There isn’t just sadness, or anger, or pain, it’s all of it at once,” suggests Kate Sánchez, editor-in-chief for the But Why Tho? community. “They’re intimate performances that focus more on what their face is doing rather than what they’re speaking.”
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“Abuse doesn’t reach terminal velocity at the very start of a relationship,” adds Alisha Grauso, editorial lead at Atom Tickets. “Often, it doesn’t reach it at all. It happens in uncomfortable, hard to define moments, sometimes from the very people who are supposed to support us, and that’s what both Keough and especially Moss do so well.”
This idea is particularly fascinating when you consider how little we know about each character. “The Invisible Man” director Leigh Whannell has shared the important thought process that went into his refusal to show Adrian’s prior abuse, and the video snippets we see in “The Lodge” are all we need to know about Grace’s indoctrination into the cult (and subsequent deprogramming). What we do see is how these experiences shape every little interaction and object around the characters.
Of course, the monsters in each film could not be more different. “The Invisible Man” is a direct translation of emotional abuse; Adrian’s presence is felt throughout the film—even when he is supposed to be “absent” from Cecilia’s life—and when we do finally encounter him, we quickly notice the cracks in his charming exterior. “The Lodge” is trickier. Young Aidan cannot comprehend the damage he’s doing to the character of Grace, but he does understand that she is placed in opposition to him and his sister’s desires.
“They have looked into Grace’s past and they’re using what they know about her against her,” Walsh explains. “It’s in every manipulator’s playbook.”
But the line between empowering and exploitative is razor-thin in horror, and not every audience member will walk out feeling that Cecilia and Grace break from current trends in independent horror. So many contemporary horror films— like “Hereditary,” “The Witch,” “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” and the upcoming “Saint Maud”—explore ideas of victimhood, but that has saturated the market with movies conflating mental illness with personal horror, not always to the betterment of the material.
“Too often, women are retraumatized by the people around them who refuse to see survivors of abuse as whole, complete people for whom that past abuse is just a fragment of their story,” Grauso adds. “Female survivors and ‘abuse victim’ become synonymous.”
Viewed from this perspective, both “The Lodge” and “The Invisible Man” could be seen to reduce their characters to the point of unresolved trauma. If nothing else, they remain movies that will morph based on the experiences you bring as an audience member.
“Being a victim of gaslighting is a life-changing experience,” Walsh concludes. “You have to learn to turn your intuition back on again and listen to it. You have to figure out what’s real and what’s not.”
Perhaps this, then, is where the idea of gaslighting parts ways with the genre and opens doors to other modes of cinema. After all, horror filmmakers have always been better and pulling something apart than putting it back together.
