Based on Richard Matheson’s 1956 novel “The Shrinking Man,” director Jack Arnold’s existential atomic age thriller stars Grant Williams as Scott Carey, who while vacationing on a boat with his wife Louise (Randy Stuart) is exposed to a mysterious white mist that leaves a glistening coat on his body. Six months later, Scott notices that his clothes have begun to hang on him and he consults with a doctor who confirms that, incredibly, he seems to be actually shrinking.
Told in Scott’s voiceover narration, the story jumps ahead to a point where Scott is now only three feet tall and his life has radically changed. Financially struggling, hounded by reporters, and wallowing in self-loathing, Scott has become a shell of a man, unable to satisfy his wife (the film hints at this; the book is more explicit), and when his condition stabilizes he briefly finds companionship with Clarice (April Kent), a carnival sideshow dwarf.
All too soon, however, the shrinking process resumes, and the film moves ahead in time again to find Scott living in a dollhouse, where he is terrorized by the family cat. During a cat and human-mouse chase scene, Scott winds up falling into a box of rags in the basement, where—presumed a victim of feline foul play—he ineffectually struggles to make his presence known to his wife upstairs (stairs that he is too small to climb) before settling into survival mode as he navigates a deadly mousetrap holding life-saving cheese and faces off against a hellbent tarantula.
Although Universal wanted an unambiguously happy ending with Scott returned to normal size, Arnold and screenwriter Matheson held out for a more metaphysical finish that still resonates 60-plus years later. But the studio successfully lobbied for a linear story instead of the novel’s flashback structure, and a few uncomfortable subplots from the book were cut, including a scene with a drunk pedophile who picks up a hitchhiking Scott, and a voyeuristic relationship Scott has with a teenage babysitter hired so his wife can go to work. Some prefer the novel to the film and vice versa, but both are different enough to be judged on their own terms. In that respect, the movie holds its own as a special-effects-laden thriller that probes nuclear age anxieties and diminished masculinity.
Presented with a sparkling 4K digital restoration, extras include a new audio commentary featuring genre-film historian Tom Weaver and horror-music expert David Schecter, a featurette on the film’s special effects, a new conversation between filmmaker Joe Dante and comedian and writer Dana Gould, the 2021 documentary “Auteur on the Campus: Jack Arnold at Universal,” a 2016 interview with Richard Christian Matheson (novelist and screenwriter Richard Matheson’s son), a 1983 interview with director Jack Arnold, 8 mm home-cinema versions of the film from 1969, the featurette “The Lost Music of The Incredible Shrinking Man,” a trailer and teaser narrated by filmmaker Orson Welles, and a booklet with an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien.
A seminal ‘50s sci-fi classic, this is recommended.