The Empty Man (2020)

When her teenage daughter Amanda (Sasha Frolova) disappears, leaving behind a message about something called “The Empty Man” on a mirror, possibly written in blood, Nora Quail (Marin Ireland) asks family friend James Lasombra (James Badge Dale) for help. James is the owner of a gun shop now, but earlier in life, he was an undercover cop, and he’s certainly willing to go to places and ask questions the actual police won’t while generally keeping on civil footing with the cops. Driven by trauma and a tendency to strange visions or dreams, James follows Amanda’s trail through the shadows of an urban myth concerning said Empty Man, to a cosmicist cult dressing itself up in self help clothes, and, eventually, into even darker places.

It is rather frustrating that any commercial prospects for David Prior’s adaptation of motives of Cullen Bunn’s and Vanesa Del Rey’s still unfinished comic series “The Empty Man” that’s best to see as a form of prequel to the comics, may have had died with the Disney’s acquisition of Fox and the PR-less dumping of the film in some cinemas and on streaming (apparently, there’s not even a BluRay in the making), seeing how this is certainly one of the best mid-budget (which in our genre means the highest budget) horror/weird fiction movies of the last decades.

On the other hand, the film’s love for really digging into cosmicist and nihilist philosophy not just on the lore level, but metaphorically, in its character work, as well as a comment on the genre it is working in, may very well not be the sort of thing to drag The Conjuring et al from their ill-gotten throne under better circumstances. Hell, it’s possible it’s not even going to interest much of an audience apart from those viewers and critics that have been singing its praises ever since they stumbled upon it despite all of Disney’s efforts to not make money from it. The film’s commercial failure is not for a lack of Prior trying, for while this is a deeply thought through, slow paced and detail obsessed movie, its director is not at all averse to the nice horror set piece, dropping in what feels like homages to all different kind of horror sub-genres, with some particularly heavy nods towards Hideo Nakata-style J-horror and the giallo. Of course, the former always had a whiff of cosmic horror anyway in the way its monsters related to the people they haunt, so there’s more than just homage work, it’s a director using stylistic elements learned from kindred spirits. Prior is very style-conscious, filling his film with slow, lingering shots loaded with meaning, and putting so much telling background detail on the screen, the film really needs rewatching for all of that alone.

Prior works a lot with visual parallels, moments where gestures and postures call back to things seen earlier in the movie, shapes that repeat in background and foreground, and motives and visual metaphors that shift meaning. Fitting to the philosophy it presents, it is a film full of ambiguities where the reality of much what we see is regularly put into doubt, where identities and the relationships between people seem to shift and be rebuilt, with only trauma and pain staying the same; even when trauma may not be real as we understand it. The film is so ambiguous, even its seemingly clear cut twist ending can be read very differently indeed, the film telling two very different stories that just happen to end in the same catastrophe.

I really admire how Prior creates this shifting sense and a feeling of liminality by being very controlled and precise about what he shows and how, the film creating a feeling of utter ambiguity and existential dread through control, focus and precision – like meditation going very wrong indeed (or if you follow the ideas of many characters in the film, very right indeed). The cast really seems to get that too, Dale entering every frame he is in (which is basically every frame after the prologue) giving off an impression of dislocation, being very much there in body but in doubt of everything in mind, whereas Frolova and Ireland manage to give their characters a diffuseness around their edges without drifting off into the abstract.

The Empty Man is simply such a great, accomplished film, so assured of itself (as if made by a filmmaker putting everything into a single shot at a feature film, though I hope it’s not going to be his only film), so perfectly okay with not being for everyone, it’s just a joy to watch. If cosmicism gives you joy, obviously.