The Empty Man (2020)

directed by David Prior

USA, France

137 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

----

Okay. I need to talk about this movie. It had its theatrical release while many theaters were still shuttered and suffered from the general loss of exposure that all movies released during the pandemic did, and then it took a further hit when everybody immediately hated it and started talking about how terrible it is, only for a different crowd to find it a few months later and begin a spate of YouTube videos and reviews about why this is actually a fantastic film. And I have to say- I'm not usually one to buy into hype like that, and I always try to approach movies that have such a wildly mixed response with skepticism, but all of the reviews claiming that The Empty Man is something far, far better than the first impression it made on people are one thousand percent right. This movie is on another level.

So the opening scene is just some of the best horror I've ever seen. There's about twenty minutes before the title card comes on, and for that time, I was sucked in, fascinated, and utterly won over by the creeping dread that I wish I could say set the tone for what came right after it. After the title card hits, the film unfortunately becomes something very similar to a lot of the really bad "teen horror" movies that have come out in the past couple of years, like The Bye Bye Man, and this is where I can see a lot of people beginning to lose hope- and I can't say I blame them, who wants to watch a two-and-a-half-hour version of The Bye Bye Man?- but you have to be aware that pretty much everything this movie does to disguise itself as a generic teen horror movie is elaborate subterfuge. It is really convincing at this for a while. It gives the protagonist his requisite "dead family" backstory and inserts a bunch of incredibly shallow, blank-faced teens doing some ritual they found on the internet or something. But for the most part all of the stuff that comes off as cliche and unoriginal is there to distract you from the completely horrifying core of what is honestly one of the best cosmic horror stories I've seen. I knew I was hooked from the moment I saw that thing at the beginning and recognized it as a visual reference to Beksinski's "Trumpeter".

The thing that sucks about this is that I can't talk about what this movie really is without ruining some of the fun. It's always a little bit of a delight to go into a movie that is widely hated and realize that it's actually great. But if I elaborate on the themes of The Empty Man, I'll start spoiling it. So consider this a checkpoint: Everything I've said thus far should serve as proof enough that there's way more to this than meets the eye, and if you haven't already seen it, you should probably stop here for maximum enjoyment.

But carrying on- I am absolutely floored that 20th Century Fox released a movie with ideas like this behind it. I can definitely see why it was a commercial failure. It's packaged like something you could catch in a theater (if you were not worried about catching something else in theaters) that would be mindless and very similar to all the other really boring horror movies with a bunch of teens doing stupid stuff the 2010s had to offer. If you don't want to see that kind of thing, you will hate large chunks of this movie until you realize it was intentionally misleading you. If you do go in for movies like that, the excessive running time and wacky philosophical ideas are just going to piss you off. This is a movie that can please very few people, and I'm amazed any studio, nevermind possibly THE largest studio in the Western world, dared its bucks on putting it out there. I wish I had looked up the director before watching this, because if I had I would have been psyched about it from the minute I heard of it: David Prior directed one of my favorite short films and pieces of Lovecraftian horror, AM1200, and seeing him branch out into full (and I really do mean full)-length horror is incredibly exciting, especially because he seems to be keeping the hard Lovecraftian themes maxed out at all times. That also explains why the first 20 minutes of this seem like a knockout short film: it's made by someone who has experience with knockout short films.

To call this Lovecraftian is to erase a lot of the nuance of it, which is why I want to acknowledge that in many ways it is a Lovecraftian story (cults dimly glimpsing cosmic beings vaster than humanity is able to comprehend), but it also goes way, way deeper than that into the territory of, like, severe philosophical horror that will give you a serious crisis if you think about it too hard. This isn't just Lovecraftian in the sense of big tentacle monsters that make you go crazy. This is cosmic, a question of identity and the fundamental inability of us as a species to perceive everything that exists- or even a fraction of what might exist- in the universe. I thought the whole cult angle was going to be part of the boring teen subplot, but it's actually crucial. "Cult" is just a half-fitting name for this group of people tapped into a deep and incredibly unsettling truth of existence. And again- 20th Century Fox released this. You could have walked into a theater and bought a ticket for this and sat next to somebody who just likes going to the movies and has never heard of H.P. Lovecraft in their life. There's something that I really love and encourage about that, because I am all for a halt being put to gatekeeping in the horror genre, but it's hard to imagine that anybody thought this would be marketable to a wider audience in any way whatsoever.

I really don't know what else to say about this or how to describe its particular brand of existential horror. It's just all done so unbelievably well, even the parts where it's misleading you into thinking it's something that it's not. The only reason I gave this four and a half stars instead of five was because the Empty Man is the worst part of The Empty Man. The creature design reads like something that was inserted hastily by somebody who thought horror only works if it has a physical face (in the form of a monster) that the viewer can be afraid of. Every instance in this movie where the figure of the "Empty Man" himself was would have been far better off with a void, a hole, an absence. The real horror of this exists somewhere well beyond the visual, and slapping on a raggedy black shadowman just felt like adding an unneeded element of familiarity to something where the unfamiliar is all there is. But a handful of appearances from a generic monster that probably amounted to five total minutes out of, and I will say this one more time, an ungodly long film (but not in a bad way!) is not something I have a huge problem with. The overall vibe of this is absolutely on point and is what I love to see when I watch horror. I'm praying that David Prior returns with a follow-up that matches the conceptual intensity of this one and maybe shrugs off the mantle of appealing to a big studio audience. I will be thinking about this movie for months.