Photograph: Allstar/Film4Įurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (Netflix) Since coronavirus put paid to this year’s Eurovision song contest, superfans of the annual kitsch extravaganza will have to make do with Will Ferrell’s all-star sendup. ‘No real bite’: Isla Fisher, Steve Coogan and Asa Butterfield in Greed. The film relies on the couple’s sparky chemistry to make it seem cuter than it is: perhaps it should have been a thriller after all.
Fast-forwarding to the 1980s, Overboard ( on iTunes) attempted the unlikely balancing act of a gaslighting romcom, as snooty rich girl Goldie Hawn is afflicted with the kind of convenient movie amnesia that makes it a cinch for opportunistic carpenter Kurt Russell to swan in and claim he was her husband all along. It’s deliciously overheated stuff, but the performances give it cruel emotional weight.
Wealthy dowager Katharine Hepburn is so desperate to refute the mental stability of her psychologically fragile niece Elizabeth Taylor – and thus suppress a supposedly unsavoury family secret – that she pushes for a lobotomy. Humidly expanded by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal from a one-act play by the former, Suddenly, Last Summer ( on Amazon) proved it could be the foundation of full-blown melodrama. Gaslighting stories aren’t limited to the thriller genre, of course. Powerful peformances: Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer. Its true meaning, that of undermining someone’s trust in their own sanity, is a rather more subtle, insidious process, presented here to maximum claustrophobic effect. Among its many virtues, Whannell’s film offers a perfect metaphorical primer on the concept of “gaslighting” – a buzzword often thrown about these days to refer to any form of lying.
Now out on streaming and DVD, it’s a horror film that assumes the victim’s perspective in ways both bracing and classical: there may be a rich tradition of imperilled horror heroines pursued by violent, insistent men, but The Invisible Man builds her plight as a thoroughly era-attuned meditation on toxic masculinity and the difficulty that victimised women often have in being believed. A steely, sharp-witted reimagination of a dusty old Universal fantasy franchise, Leigh Whannell’s film succeeded by flipping audience expectations of whose story to tell from its far-fetched premise: not the millionaire playboy scientist who discovers ingenious means of invisibility, but the ordinary, unassuming woman – played with frenzied commitment by Elisabeth Moss – he chooses to torment with these powers, in ways only she can see and feel. In the before times, when films were still being released in cinemas, The Invisible Man staked an early claim as the year’s best mainstream blockbuster.
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