Rent The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

Head Movie (spoiler). - The Incredible Shrinking Man review by Steve

Behind the schlocky fifties exploitation title, this is an intelligent science fiction action film. Grant Williams plays a middle class everyman who is accidentally exposed to radiation and begins to lose size. As he does, his relationship to his comfortable, materialistic lifestyle begins to shift.

Experimental medicine arrests his decline, for a while. He again starts to lose mass and eventually falls into his cellar and is presumed dead by his despairing wife. This last third of the film below ground is about his fight for survival, particularly a brilliantly staged combat with a (relatively) giant spider.

He finds meaning within confines of his new universe which he had lost as diminished man in the normal sized world. Eventually he loses sense of his physicality and becomes a transcendental being, freed from the limits of his human perspective.  It's astonishing that Universal allowed the film to end like this. They actually wanted him to be cured and to return to normality! Which would have been absurd.

This is easily the best film by sci-fi/horror expert Jack Arnold. It was Twilight Zone regular Richard Matheson's debut screenplay, adapted from his novel. The visual effects of the shrinking man's changing relationship with his environment are impressive, but it is his interior, philosophical world that leaves the deeper impression.

Classic and Fantastic SciFi/Horror - The Incredible Shrinking Man review by GI

The fear of radiation and/or nuclear holocaust that led to a cycle of science fiction and horror films made in the 1950s are ripe for rediscovery by a modern audience, many are now considered classics of the genre and of American Cinema in general; films such as Invasion of The Body Snatchers (1956) and Them (1954) being two superb examples. The Incredible Shrinking Man is also one of the best, a remarkably well structured and photographed film considering its age. Essentially it's a 'Robinson Crusoe' narrative where a happily married man (Grant Williams) is exposed to a strange radioactive mist and begins to gradually shrink. First he has to deal with the fear and emotions of the change and the effect on his marriage and then the social stigma of being different. Then the story moves into a survival narrative and the horrors of battling to live. Williams performance is very good when you consider that he had to act against nothing at all to achieve the effect of being very small as this all before green screen and CGI. The resulting film is exciting, very scary and tense. Film fans I urge you to seek this out it's simply fantastic and its fully restored for DVD and BluRay.

Honey, I Shrunk the Existential Crisis - The Incredible Shrinking Man review by griggs

A man exposed to radiation begins to shrink — a daft idea on paper, but The Incredible Shrinking Man turns it into genuine horror. Under Jack Arnold’s sharp direction, the film makes fear itself the monster. No aliens, no mad scientists — just an ordinary man disappearing while the world around him grows hostile.

Arnold’s craftsmanship is remarkable. The 1950s effects still look convincing: clever angles, oversized sets, and pure invention make every room feel like a trap. The cat attack is domestic horror at its finest — absurd, tense, and oddly tragic. You believe every second of it.

What lingers is the psychology. This is a man shrinking in every sense — pride, power, purpose. Seventy years later, it still stings. And that final monologue — calm, cosmic, quietly devastating — turns pulp into poetry, ending on a note that’s small, infinite, and unforgettable.