FROM THE BUCKET REVIEWS ARCHIVE

Review: Griff the Invisible

Danny Baldwin · August 28, 2011

Griff the Invisible /

Ryan Kwanten stars as a wannabe-superhero of a questionable mental state in Griff the Invisible.

It’s an established movie convention: characters who are more than a little ‘off’ serve as hyperboles for the outsider in all of us, and we root for them as an expression of this. The first two acts of Griff the Invisible, a new film from Australia starring “True Blood”-actor Ryan Kwanten as the title character, thrive on this convention. Griff is a lovable loner, harassed by his co-workers, who moonlights as a caped crusader at night, saving his neighborhood from crime. He invents an invisibility cloak by–who woulda thunk it–using the recipe for invisible ink. For a solid hour, the movie coasts on its farcical charms and Kwanten’s endearing characterizations; while not especially original, it’s a welcome cinematic sugar-high. But then, it makes a befuddling storytelling choice in its final act. Griff finds himself a girlfriend in Melody (Maeve Dermody) and, through her perspective, we learn that the invisibility cloak doesn’t make Griff invisible and he is actually imagining his hand-to-hand combat with criminals. But let him have his fun, she thinks, whimsically falling for Griff even further as she helps him stake out a crime scene. If this isn’t a direct glamorization of mental illness, I don’t know what is. For most of Griff the Invisible, we can accept Griff’s exploits as symbols within the make-believe land of a movie. But once writer/director Leon Ford establishes, without a doubt, that Griff is a schizophrenic and encourages his delusions, the movie becomes borderline offensive. It’s a strange, unfortunate turn for a film that is initially quite the charmer.

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Griff the Invisible (2011, Australia). Produced by Jan Chapman, Scott Meek, Belinda Mravicic, and Nicole O’Donohue. Directed and written for the screen by Leon Ford. Starring Ryan Kwanten, Maeve Dermody, Marshall Napier, Heather Mitchell, Patrick Brammall, and Chan Griffin. Distributed by Indomina Releasing. Rated PG-13, with a running time of 90 minutes.