Movie Review : The Empty Man (2020)
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There are two types of people in life: those who learn the lyrics of every song they love and those who just relentlessly vibe to the music. Everything always needs to make sense for the first type. At least within the context of their lives. The second type can stop whatever urgent task they’re doing to listen to a 17 minutes long psychedelic rock song. David Prior’s The Empty Man is a movie for that second type. It’s all vibes and no meaning and it’s kind of great the way it is?
The Empty Man is told in an oddly complicated way. It starts in 1995, where four American hikers in Nepal accidentally stumble upon an ancient tomb. The movie transports itself in a small Midwest town in 2018 right after they find their demise to follow James Lasombra (James Badge Dale) a widowed ex-detective who is trying to find the daughter of a friends who disappeared. All she left behind is a message written in blood: the empty man made me do it.
Arbitrariness of meaning
One thing that is both a strength and a weakness for The Empty Man is that there isn’t just one movie in there. Based on an ongoing graphic novel that has eight issues so far, it incorporates no-to-seamlessly elements from different horror subgenres likes supernatural horror, slashers, cult mystery and then some. I wouldn’t really know what to call it except just horror. A movie might’ve been the wrong way to adapt this one. It was a television show at heart.
For example, there’s no reason to have a slasher segment in the middle of The Empty Man. It serves no purpose whatsoever. It doesn’t ties up both part of the movie together. It’s just there and it’s kind of cool? The overarching theme of the movie is the arbitrariness of meaning in our lives and it serves as boogeyman figure for kids who stray off the beaten path, even if the said beaten path did nothing but hurt our protagonist James or his friend Nora (Marin Ireland)
Because of that theme or arbitrariness of meaning, nothing is really explained either. James has to draw meaning and piece information together from what he observes around the cult and that’s kind of cool. I like that I didn’t quite know who the empty man was and how the hell it all worked together because what I come up with in my head will always be infinitely worse than whatever explanation the movie provides. So, I guess it does qualify as weird fiction?
Itoesque
Another detail I liked about The Empty Man is that it seems to draw visual inspiration from Japanese manga artist Junji Ito. There are scenes where the painfully mundane cohabits with the otherworldly weird, like when James breaks into Pontifex Institute’s camp and finds video tapes of students communicating with the greater unknown and doing unspeakable things. This was among the scariest scenes in the movie and the scariest scenes I’ve seen in a while.
One way it could’ve been made more Itoesque would’ve been to cut the ominous beginning in Nepal. It’s too obvious. We didn’t need to know THAT much about how that entity came in contact with our world. It would’ve worked better if it had been just an unfortunate cosmic accident, I think. The Empty Man is wildly original despite the loose logic, except for that segment which seems ripped off from Netflix’ adaptation from Adam Nevill’ novel The Ritual.
*
I liked The Empty Man a lot, but it felt almost like a fortunate accidental. The pieces only loosely fit together, but it’s consistently atmospheric and mysterious, so it works well if you don’t ask yourself too many questions. It’s the type of movie you watch late at night with a glass of liquor, which is exactly what I did. It’s frustrating though, because it had the potential to be so much more. But it’s the type of movie that will inspire people to make something better out of it.
