You Can’t Run or Hide From ‘THE INVISIBLE’ (Review)
Darkfield takes one of their shipping container shows to virtual reality
My heart is pounding. I’m clenching my fists as they sit in my lap. There’s a man, his voice taut and strained, speaking into my left ear.
You, he says disdainfully.
I can feel myself shrinking, trying to become smaller, making my body more defensible. I begin to cry. I’m holding my breath, afraid to make a single move lest I incur his wrath. He continues speaking, inches away from my ear. He’s mean and abusive as he continues his deranged monologue. He makes absurd demands of the others around me. I can almost feel tension in the air. He has full, unbridled command of the theater I stepped into a few minutes ago, a petit venue containing only two rows of seats facing a tiny, curtained off stage.
And we’re all — all of us — trapped in here with him in a nightmare scenario.
Except: none of this is real.
Darkfield’s immersive audio experience, THE INVISIBLE, is based off the 2020 film version of The Invisible Man. THE INVISIBLE is a 20-minute audio experience which placed approximately two dozen participants in a shipping container, all listening to headphones simultaneously as the experience unfolds. This partnership with Universal Pictures first appeared at Universal Studios Hollywood in California for a brief span of a few days in February before shutting down just shortly before the 2020 lockdowns began. And now it’s been recreated as afree VR experience, digital shipping container and all, as part of a gallery showing off UK-based immersive work in the Museum of Other Realities (PC-based VR or a Quest with Link cable and gaming PC is required to participate).
The pivot to virtual reality is an interesting one for Darkfield. I mean, most of the time, you could say there’s literally nothing to see at a Darkfield show. The company are masters of binaural audio: DOUBLE puts a stranger in your home kitchen, VISITORS spawns ghosts in your living room, and ETERNAL makes you wonder if someone else is in the bed with you, all through the power of suggestion, masterful use of foley, and more. These spatial soundscapes are astoundingly impressive just from a technical perspective. And the creators at Darkfield make your brain think action is happening just behind you or someone is speaking to you next to your ear, when there’s nobody physically there. It’s just you, Darkfield, and a pair of headphones. Having done three Darkfield Radio shows in the past, I generally found the tenor of my previous experiences to be, for the most part, eerie and unsettling, with the worst moments of fright rearing their pretty little heads the most in ETERNAL.
But THE INVISIBLE takes the kind of abject terror possible using binaural sound to an entirely new level. This is less about making you think your environment isn’t as safe or familiar or normal as you believe it to be; here, the violent and controlling main character of THE INVISIBLE knows your name, who you are, who you came here with, and if you’re lying to him. You’re not so much piercing the veil or entering into his world as you are being abducted into it. You are his hostage. He is the kidnapper in control; he holds all the cards and he knows it. And when he says dance, you better dance.
Perhaps the most terrifying part about this all was knowing that even if I did open my eyes, I would see… only darkness around me within the confines of virtual reality. The weight of my headset and the slight pressure of my headphones reminded me that I was tethered, fully enveloped in Darkfield’s sick, twisted world, whether I kept my eyes open or shut. Darkfield still controlled what I saw: all 360 degrees of blackness around me. And even if I did choose to take off the headphones and VR headset, and eject myself out of the experience (as I was tempted to do multiple times) well, it really doesn’t matter.
Let’s not forget why they call him The Invisible Man. He’s invisible. He could be anywhere in the world right now and you would never know. He could be sitting here, next to me, at my kitchen table, at 10pm on a Sunday night. Maybe he’s watching me type these very words on my laptop, changing emdashes into parentheses and flipping through my online thesaurus. I would never know he was there, watching and waiting; I can’t see him and I can’t feel him.
But he’s already terrorized me. After all, I’m boring, now. But you?
Well, now. I’m pretty certain, he can’t wait to “see” you.
THE INVISIBLE continues as part of the UK Immersive Arcade, available for free on the Museum of Other Realities for two weeks starting March 12, 2021.
Participants must have a tethered VR headset; Quest users must connect their Quests to a PC.
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