While Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man is a fantastic piece film all around, a great contributor to its excellence is its visual style. The writer/director worked hard to fully capture the terror that can be inspired by the titular fiend, and that focus ultimately delivered both impressive individual shots, and impressive sequences. The secret is in the strong attention to detail – which extends to the fact that there are a few excellent Easter eggs to be discovered throughout the film.
With The Invisible Man now available not only digitally, but on 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD, I recently had the pleasure of doing an interview with Leigh Whannell and producer Jason Blum to discuss their work on the project, and used part of my time with them to ask about certain Easter eggs that fans should be looking for while rewatching the film. The director provided hints about two of them, and you can watch them talk about it by clicking play on the video below.
Those of you who have fun hunting down Easter eggs in movies now have a mission: rewatch The Invisible Man and discover the special references that Leigh Whannell included to both his previous directorial effort, Upgrade, and the film that helped put him on the map: James Wan’s Saw. However, if you don’t want to do the leg work yourself, the good news is that I’ve already dug through the film with a fine-tooth comb and uncovered the details to which Whannell refers in the interview.
Let’s start with Upgrade – which was released back in 2018, and is yet another awesome movie from the writer/director. For those who haven’t seen it, the film is set in an advanced near future, and begins centered on a luddite mechanic named Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) and his wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo), who works for a company called Cobalt, one of the world’s biggest technology companies in the world. That’s interesting information to keep in the back of your mind when you re-read the obituary that Emily (Harriet Dyer) shares with Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) in the first act of The Invisible Man:
Kind of a mind-blower, right? It turns out that optics genius Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) was the founder of the company that employs Asha Trace. Does this mean that The Invisible Man actually fits within canon of Upgrade and is a prequel spin-off of sorts? It’s fun to think of it that way for now, and we’ll have to wait and see if Leigh Whannell winds up adding to the possible continuity with future projects.
The Saw Easter egg is admittedly a bit more basic, but it is a part of a larger tradition. Both James Wan and Leigh Whannell have frequently used images of Billy The Puppet in their movies in the years since the release of Saw (including films like Dead Silence, Death Sentence, and Insidious), and now The Invisible Man is the latest chapter in that saga:
The screenshot above comes from the third act of The Invisible Man, shortly after Cecilia manages to escape the mental hospital where she is sent following the death of her sister. Her attempts to shoot at her invisible attacker result in another driver having an accident, and you can see a graffiti painting of Billy The Puppet after the driver gets out of his car and Cecilia steals his vehicle.
Pretty cool, right? And the best news of all is that just watching for Easter eggs isn’t the only great part about watching The Invisible Man a second time, as the film is really just a fantastic ride all around – even knowing all of the twist and turns beforehand. You can purchase your copy of the movie on home video now, and be on the lookout for more about the film here on CinemaBlend!
