‘We adapt and we survive. The function of life is survival...’
Everyone occasionally feels out of step with the rest of the world. In fact, in an age of social media and extreme division, society has never felt more fractured. Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes this anxiety to the nth degree. What if you really were different to everybody else? What if the world moved on without you? It’s a nightmarish concept and fittingly, Philip Kaufman’s remake of the 1956 original plays like one long nightmare…
Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), an inspector for the environmental health department, and his co-worker Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) begin to suspect that an alien race is in the midst of taking over the world by stealth. People begin to act strangely. Personalities change. A hive mind sets in. They enlist the help of two warring psychiatrists (Jeff Goldblum and Leonard Nimoy) and set about trying to save the world.
The ‘invasion’ here begins slowly. A previously slobby man gets a haircut and starts wearing a suit. Another man becomes blank behind the eyes. It seems that wherever our protagonists go, suspicious eyes follow them. Kaufman, directing from W.D. Richter’s adaptation of Jack Finney’s classic novel, gets the pacing just right. There are long scenes with hardly any dialogue and just a throbbing, pulsating score, and these moments are often the most gripping. Partly due to the atmospheric lighting and lingering long shots and partly due to the exquisite creature design and use of practical effects, Invasion of the Body Snatchers crawls under your skin and stays there like mould.
As a teenager, The Faculty was one of my all-time favourite movies, and it’s striking to see how similar the two films are. Both have a likeable ensemble cast. Both combine moments of absurd hilarity with terrifying horror. Perhaps most pertinently, both are utterly successful in achieving an inexorable sense of dread. I don’t know why it has taken me so long to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers but I can safely say that it is deserving of its stellar reputation.