Most pre-Gojira Japanese science fiction cinema, even if it isn’t the no-man’s-land its reputation suggests, isn’t exactly self-conscious art. Its texture is blunt and suggestively playful, grimy and loaded with pulp. While Ishiro Honda’s apocalyptic Gojira unleashes an antediluvian earth resurrected by modernity’s godlike attempt to subject reality to what Martin Heidegger called “standing reserve,” and his later Matango evokes a world in which humanity was mutating in multiple directions, Nobuo Adachi’s The Invisible Man Appears doesn’t initially seem to have quite so much on its mind.

Yet Adachi’s film explores the entanglement of control and curiosity as shifting sand in a world where the possibilities, and perils, of the modern world seem both omnipresent and evaporative. In this tight potboiler, Dr. Kenzo Nakagato (Ryunosuke Tsukigata) tasks his two proteges, Shunji Kurokawa (Kanji Koshiba) and Daijiro Natsukawa (Kysouke Segi), with the development of an invisibility serum, offering his niece Ryuko Mizuki (Takiko Mizunoe) to the victor. Success in post-war Japan is a cut-throat intermarriage of private and public, in which personal ambition on all fronts is tethered to national and corporate well-being in a psychologically bruised and physically devastated ex-empire.

The Invisible Man Appears paints a damning portrait of the atmosphere of achievement after the war. In its untampered viciousness, its straightforward rendering of a nation violently humbled, Invisible Man Appears depicts a mercenary world of battered, hostile ambition as a coping mechanism for a damaged national pride. Visualized in Adachi’s film, the fight for invisibility could be a natural military weapon, a potent response to Western dominance. Indeed, one survivor of the atomic bomb in John Hersey’s journalistic classic Hiroshima describes the explosion as a giant camera flash, an apocalyptic attempt to reduce Japanese citizens not only into dead bodies but transparent, knowable objects. Rewriting the bomb as the most catastrophic episode in a history of geopolitical conflict and ocular-technological Western hegemony, the man only survives because he hides behind a wall, renders himself invisible to its objectifying force. What The Invisible Man Appears posits is that responding to force with force ultimately rendered Japan complicit in the same culture of conflict and brutal control.

For a presumably cash-strapped production, Nobuo Adachi’s film is also unusually attentive to the complexity of invisibility and visibility as forces that contour cinematic depiction itself. The environment itself seems to warp and weave around us at times, such that everything becomes, potentially, more or less translucent as the film moves along. The camera tracks the invisibility in many ways. At times, it provides us with the gaze of the apparent villain, stalking its prey. In a canny scene, a department store becomes a parody of window shopping, everyday consumer praxis as a form of mundane invisibility. At other times, it turns in various ways on the thin membrane between absence and presence. When the camera is pitched between two visible men, negative space itself becomes the visible element. What it gestures to that the Universal classic The Invisible Man, wonderful though it is, often neglected is that science itself, including cinematic technology, was mutating our understanding of the world, of what we understand to be visible and what we feel is invisible.

It’s all perhaps a bit inconsistent, and I wouldn’t necessarily claim that it amounts to a theory of cinematic invisibility or anything like that, but The Invisible Man Appears is more adventurous than it needed to be, and you can see it tinkering around with what invisibility means, with whether invisibility is something that happens within a film or happens to a film. Or, perhaps most of all, asking if cinema itself may be an agent of violent invisibility, a friction-filled clock that looks at and through its characters but is not seen by them, quietly shaping their possibilities and their failures, a mechanism of science, much like art, gone awry. The film itself, the forces of progress run amok that the camera, like the bomb, captures, momentarily joins with, and finally fails, seems to be both expanding and evaporating before our very eyes. In a world where forces of control are often beyond our comprehension, it seems to be taunting us with what it means for a film to visualize invisibility.

Score: 8/10