Horror is filled with curses that unleash boogeymen on unsuspecting souls after they’re dared to do the one thing that invokes them. Those evil entities don’t just kill their victims; they toy with them for a while first. Sadako crawls from her well to destroy those that dared to watch her tape in seven days. Slender Man tormented teens with nightmares and hallucinations for an indeterminate period before taking them, the triggering evocation being a viral video on the net. Whoever dared to say The Bye Bye Man eventually received death at his hands.
Now there’s The Empty Man, a supernatural entity that brings death when summoned in a specific way. While it only takes three days for the Empty Man to collect, his cinematic introduction stretches on like a hollow eternity.
Written and directed by David Prior, adapted for the screen from a graphic novel of the same name, The Empty Man doesn’t have an opening sequence; it has an opening movie. Four hikers trek through South Asia, venturing deep into the mountains. Just as a storm threatens to blow in, leaving them exposed to blizzard conditions, one of them hears a strange sound. He falls into a cavern, triggering the curse that will see them all doomed over the next three days. Only once each day has passed and their story concludes does the title card arrive to pass the torch to Missouri, where ex-cop James Lasombra (James Badge Dale) is tasked with tracking down a missing teen who summoned the Empty Man.
For a while in the two hour and seventeen-minute runtime, The Empty Man seems content to stretch out its entire feature-length on the simple setup of a formulaic cursed urban legend. You summon it, then three days later, you die. There are no established rules beyond this, nor does the entity itself have much of a presence. Prior is so interested in keeping the Empty Man and its legend shrouded in mystery that the narrative fights to maintain cohesion. Worse, it struggles to fill in increasingly large gaping voids in the plot. It’s a series of different movies crammed into one, all connected by a dreary style and tone that makes its lead sleepwalk through his investigation.
What starts as a standard set up in a new setting then shifts to a gritty procedural then slowly transforms into a psychological conspiracy thriller. After a while, the film forgets the Empty Man altogether as it focuses on existential thought experimentation and ambitious concepts of transmittable ideas. It can get as pretentious as it sounds. While that does diverge from the conventional supernatural curse story, there’s no real foothold for audiences to grab hold of. There’s no characterization, no personality or identity, and the narrative throws in world-building and mythos at whim when convenient- none of it beholden to a set logic. Part of that is intentional, but only part. The ambition got too lofty for its director to wield or deliver a coherent vision.
Prior opts for a sickly color palette and grimy set pieces to capture a neo-noir mood. He even builds his lead ex-cop character around every archetypical trope, from the loner gruffness to the troubled past. In doing so, any attempts at scares are mostly forgotten. At least halfway through, the viewer will likely piece many of the clues together before bland Lasombra does, though, no matter his hard-boiled intelligence.
While it does offer a new angle on a familiar horror setup, spinning into an entirely different subgenre in the process, The Empty Man stretches out an underbaked idea to an excruciating degree. A movie with so little to its narrative and characters should never run this long, nor should it have such a sleepy aesthetic or be so messy and convoluted in its mythology. The generic title says it all. The scariest thing about this supernatural entity is how empty, and painfully, unnecessarily long his movie is.
The Empty Man is now available in theaters and select drive-ins.
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/reviews/3638081/review-empty-man-fills-emptiness-boredom/
No comments:
Post a Comment