"I watched new horror movie The Invisible Man and now I'm afraid of my own apartment."

I have a special kind of hatred for movies that make you fear once-familiar surroundings.

The sight of drains now make me shudder thanks to IT, I always check my closet before bed because of I Know What You Did Last Summer and I will never visit a remote cabin in the woods after watching The Strangers. 

The Invisible Man, however, the new movie from Australian writer and director Leigh Whannell, has taken things one step further and has now made me fear everything from the empty corners of my living room, to the chair that sits by my bed.

Whannell has even gone so far as to make me lose trust in the one thing I had always assumed would keep the monsters away – my blanket.

Watch the terrifying trailer for The Invisible Man. You’ve been warned. Post continues after. 

This iteration of The Invisible Man is a contemporary and much more brutal spin on the famous H.G. Wells novel and 1933 sci-fi/horror film of the same name. This time around, instead of focusing in on the story of a man who successfully turns himself invisible and then is unable to reverse the effects, the movie tells the story of the woman who has become the object of his dangerous obsession.

Elisabeth Moss stars as Cecilia, a woman who is trapped in her abusive billionaire partner Adrian’s (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) high tech, fortress-like mansion in a remote area outside San Francisco. In a truly grip-the-arm-rests-of-your cinema-seat sequence of events, the movie opens on Cecilia carefully putting into motion a daring escape plan that has been months in the making.

After being picked up by her sister Emily (Australian actress Harriet Dyer) and hidden away in the home of police officer and longtime friend James (Aldis Hodge) and his teenage daughter Sydney (Storm Reid), Cecilia slowly begins to work through her intense PTSD, terrified to even step outside and collect the mail in case Adrian is waiting for her.

When news comes through that an enraged Adrian has taken his own life and can no longer terrorise her, she begins to feel a semblance of relief, at last seeing a light at the end of the tunnel after enduring years of abuse at his hands.

Unfortunately, this relief is short-lived, as the new life Cecilia has been building quickly begins to unravel.

A job interview is derailed when she finds her carefully prepared designs have been removed from her briefcase, the same bottle of drugs she dropped while fleeing Adrian's home suddenly appears in her bathroom with smears of his blood still covering it and an email is sent in her name to Emily, chastising her for being overbearing, but Cecilia is positive she didn't write it.

While everyone around her is convinced she's experiencing some sort of breakdown as a result of Adrain's abuse and death, Cecilia is sure that something much more sinister is at play.

Slowly piecing together clues, she begins to suspect that Adrian is still very much alive and, using his state-of-the-art optical technology, has somehow found a way to be invisible and is now following her every move and systematically breaking down every part of her life just to torture her.

It's within these scenes where Cecilia is slowly realising the extent of Adrian's true power and can feel his unseen presence around her where Whannell's true knack for horror-filled storytelling really shines through.

While The Invisible Man does offer up a few moments of stomach-churning gore and some brilliantly executed jump scares, the true moments of fear come from the quiet sequences where the audience is straining along with Cecilia to uncover the hidden threat.

A blanket being slowly pulled off Cecilia in the middle of the night, a knife quietly slipping off the kitchen bench and just the slightest indent in a chair tucked away in the corner of a bedroom all suddenly have the power to inject more fear into your heart than a gruesome on-screen monster ever could.

The Invisible Man is fast-paced, builds to a climactic finale and is perfectly anchored by Moss, who is adept at bringing the audience along through every moment of Cecilia's slow-burning sense of terror and then into her desperate thirst for revenge.

But just a word of warning, while The Invisible Man is one of the best horror thrillers I have seen in years, an unfortunate side effect of viewing this movie is that it has made me fear my very own apartment. Leaving me doomed to stare suspiciously into empty corners for the rest of my life.

Enjoy.

The Invisible Man is in cinemas now, it is rated MA15+.

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