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Plot:Two young teens' real selves are invisible to others, one due to his untimely death and the other due to the neglect she's endured since the death of her mother.

Cast: Justin Chatwin, Margarita Levieva, Marcia Gay Harden, Chris Marquette, Alex O'Loughlin, Callum Keith Rennie, Michelle Harrison, Ryan Kennedy, Andrew Francis, P. Lynn Johnson, Serge Houde, Desiree Zurowski, Mark Houghton, Alex Ferris, Tania Saulnier.

My Thoughts:Great picture.

Review:I wasn't expecting much from David Goyer's "The Invisible" but well I was pleasantly surprised after seeing the picture. It's not only a good supernatural horror/thriller, but also a candidate for best picture of 2007. The film follows a normal kid named Nick (Justin Chatwin) who while his life may seem perfect on the surface, in reality he's a very troubled soul. He has a girlfriend who's mostly pretentious and a mother who's exactly the same way most of the time. When a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, who Nick attends high school with named Annie (Margarita Levieva) commits a smash and grab with her boyfriend Marcus (Alex O'Loughlin), it culminates in Marcus diming her out to the cops after she takes the stolen merchandise with her to school.

However, in a misunderstanding of epic proportions, Annie and her crew corner Nick's best friend Pete (Chris Marquette), thinking he and Nick had something to with her getting busted. Thus Pete chickens out and blames Nick, who later gets the sharp end of a serious ass kicking at the hands of Annie and her crew who beat Nick to death, and leave him for dead...or so it seems. Nick now finds himself trapped between the land of the living and the dead after the assault, with Annie being the only person who can save him in time before he completely crosses over. "The Invisible" is above all else a very smart film.

It puts the viewer in the difficult position of having to relate to and understand and sometimes empathize with two main characters, both of whom have their faults yet at the same time have so much in common..yet are also so very different from one another. Nick's perfect life hides an uncaring self-involved mother, which causes him to play in that grey area of right versus wrong such as selling test answers to classmates, while Annie's terrible life has left her a thief, and a cold, unfeeling, and broken person to almost everyone, yet she stills shows an endless amount of human emotion towards her younger sibling. And as much as you want to pile on her character for being the villain of the film, Mick Davis and Christine Roum's script makes it virtually impossible for you to do so. Even if she is technically a murderer.

Annie and Nick are two of the best written characters I've seen onscreen in quite some time. And the performances of Chatwin and Levieva's brilliant performances just go to further elevate the depth of both characters and really helps to bring them fully to life on screen. The film doesn't stray from it's main plot too often, which involves Chatwin's character truly being "Invisible"...as his spirit zooms around town trying to make contact with anyone who will listen so they can help him find his beaten, battered, and near death body before he completely passes on. The problem is, no one can see him, and Chatwin's performance, plus the way the movie plays out when he is invisible to those around him makes this into a really creepy and eerie situation for the viewer to watch unfold.

But at the same time it's also ironic due to Chatwin's character going from being invisible to just his mother, to being invisible to everyone. To make matters more intriguing, the only person who can hear or see him is Annie, the girl responsible for his near death experience. Which puts him in a very precarious situation but a situation he needs to make work in order to ever have a chance at life again. And a situation which in the long run, opens his eyes to Annie's world and helps him to better understand her and her motives.

However, neither character's quest is made any easier when both him and Annie, the only person who knows he's still alive...have to deal with treachery from some of the people closest to them. But when the both of them learn more about the other, they begin to realize they've had alot more in common that they at first thought. While the films supporting cast isn't large in number, the performances of Chatwin and Levieva are so good that sometimes you forget other eople are involved in the movie at all. Marcia Gay Harden also gives an excellent performance as Nick's mother Diane who herself learns an important lesson once when her son vanishes and the local police begin conducting an all out search for his body. "The Invisible" is a very well done film, and is the perfect blend of supernatural horror/drama/and thriller all wrapped into one neat little package.

Positives:Great performances by Levieva, Chatin, and Gay Harden. A brilliant story, and great directing.

Negatives:The ending is a bit of a downer.

Overall:Definitely a picture that's worth 90 minutes of your life.





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