Harefooted Halloween: The Empty Man

What I Liked: David Prior directed the shit out of this movie.  It looks beautiful, the casting is good, the performances are great, the editing is mostly well done, the atmosphere is unsettling, there are many varied locations, the production design is cool, the pacing is methodical, etc.  Prior’s background involves a lot of behind-the-scenes documentaries including the making of a bunch of David Fincher films.  All that time studying other excellent filmmakers must have given him a unique education on the craft where he could pick up techniques through osmosis.  So with this picture you have this interesting blend of styles like what if David Fincher shot a Wes Craven script?  The technical aspects are far and away the film’s best quality.

They really went for something.  Even though I don’t think this thing comes together I admire its ambitious story.  I don’t think I’ve come across a horror film exactly like it.

What I Didn’t Like: Ok folks this is gonna get dicey so I’ll do my best to explain why this bird doesn’t land for me before going into spoilers.  There are essentially two films happening at once (you could conceivably argue three films with the ending).  One is about an urban legend called the Empty Man where you can summon him by whistling across the top of an empty bottle on a bridge at night and think intensely about him while doing so.  You know, similar to Bloody Mary or Candyman where you stare into a mirror and say their name five times to curse yourself.  Over the course of three days the Empty Man will stalk you and eventually kill you.  Plot two is about a teen girl who goes missing and an ex-cop friend of the family, James (James Badge Dale (Little Woods)), tries to track her down only to discover she was involved with a cult obsessed with the Empty Man.  This story is definitely the more interesting one because it builds wonderful mystery and suspense.  James ventures deeper and deeper into what this dangerous organization is and the weird ass supernatural shit they’re tapping into.  While the two stories are dependent on one another they don’t exactly link up successfully.  The payoff ends up being the worst of both worlds with the movie not committing to being either a full on slasher monster situation or a creepy blood thirsty cult jam.  For some the ending could tie everything together in a mind blowing way but for me it’s this awkward beast of curiosity and disappointment.

*Spoilers* Alright, so we go through all this sleuthing and all this building up of the Empty Man and all this mounting tension to come to the conclusion that basically none of it is real.  Well maybe some of it is real.  Honestly I don’t fucking know.  It turns out the cult manifested James, an actual adult human person, into existence when we met him three days prior.  He’s been kept locked up in a room for that time.  So everything we’ve gone through with him are fabricated memories.  The reason for this is the cult wants to use James to communicate with and worship the Empty Man, which is some sort of supernatural being.  This group has been around for hundreds (or thousands?) of years and uses a human bridge to relay communication between the Empty Man and his followers.  Their current messenger is dying (this is what that twenty minute opening in Bhutan relates to) and sometimes they’ve had to wait a long ass time for someone else to come along so they decided to create one in James.  In essence James was the Empty Man all along.  Truthfully guys, I don’t have a goddamn clue if I got any of this right.  If I did then this is only slightly better than the god awful it-was-all-a-dream or it-was-all-in-your-head trope.  At least this doesn’t dismiss the existence of the Empty Man or any of the supernatural shit.  But at the same time it effectively negates everything you just watched.  Nor does it explain why the Empty Man fucks with and then kills people like in a standard horror picture, or why it takes him three days to attack, or why a cursed person can possess others to kill for them, or why all the deaths are made to look like suicides or accidents or bizarre acts, or ok, you get the idea.  We don’t really learn anything about this creature.  Why it does what it does is never explained.  Or maybe they did and I missed it.  Another question you might be asking is why does the cult wanna get with the Empty Man in the first place?  World domination?  Superpowers?  Great wealth?  Not sure.  Again, they may have said but if they did I missed it.

Overall Impressions: Man, I want to like this.  Prior and co elevated the hell out of a not very good script.  From what I gather the graphic novel it’s based on is pretty different so maybe something got lost in translation.  Or it could be as much of a mess as this.  All the goodwill the filmmakers build up by doling out the mystery at the right pace to keep you interested unfortunately kinda gets flushed down the toilet with the ending.

There’s a real slim chance a re-edit could’ve saved this but that would’ve been very difficult.  Plus I think the finale is fully intended to tie all the pieces together.  It’s not something you can simply toss aside.  So we’re forced to deal with a peculiar hybrid mashup that doesn’t work as is and the separate components probably aren’t strong enough to stand on their own either.

Ironically The Empty Man isn’t empty but it ain’t full either.  I completely understand why it bombed.  When this got dumped out in 2020 the few people that saw it did not care for it.  I mean marketing the film must’ve been a nightmare as well.  It doesn’t fall neatly into a category so I don’t envy the people who had to try to sell this strange complex horror/thriller premise.  And it doesn’t help that the title is so generic with other “Man” movies like Slender Man, The Boogeyman and The Bye Bye Man released around the same time.  I know I confused all of them.

If any of this sounds intriguing then go ahead and check out this fascinating oddity of a picture.  For most folks though I can’t recommend it.