The Empty Man (Movie Review)

The Empty Man, was dumped to limited theaters in late 2020 by Disney following the conglomate's purchase of 20th Century Fox. The move made clear the entity had no clue what to do with the bloated weirdness of David Prior's film. Yet, a social media surge of online journalists and genre fans making the plunge into this 2 and a half hour oddessey are finding something unexpected: this ambitious, sprawling, horror mish-mash with a title slightly better than The Bye Bye Man is actually….good?

The Empty Man is a tough film to tie into a one or two sentence premise that adequately prepares an audience for what they’re about to watch. It’s no wonder that The Walt Disney Company found no logical way to market the film and therefore saw little to no value in pushing it to the masses. In a way, Prior’s film is simply his attempt at manifesting a revitalized creepypasta boogeyman. However, it is actually based on a graphic novel of the same name by Cullen Bunn and Vanessa Del Ray, but Prior’s vision repurposes a lot of the lore to position a supernatural boogeyman at the center of a noir type thriller/mystery. And so, the film takes focus on a former cop, James Lasombra (James Badge Dale), who becomes obsessed with tracking down his neighbor’s missing daughter who’s disappearance is related to a supernatural legend known as, "The Empty Man."

Rolling down the rabbit of this film’s plot is admittedly a tad messy and convoluted. However, it’s this reviewer’s opinion that this is one rabbit hole worth exploring on your own. The daunting run-time for such an ambitious horror yarn like this is undoubtedly a tough hill to climb and the reward will...vary. Since, there’s an abundance of plot points to be uncovered, Prior’s vision does tend to dip into the realm of being portentous with plot twists and performances that drift into an almost surreal silliness at times.

Watching The Empty Man, it is no surprise that David Prior was once a protege one David Fincher. The visual language of the film is loaded with dread-inducing imagery and set pieces that show Prior definitely was not sleeping in class. The camera lingers on artistic sets that house some genuinely unsettling visuals, while there are set pieces designed to invoke a sense of growing menace. With the help of slow zooms, editing techniques and fairly spectacular cinematography, Prior admirably manages to keep the audience engaged over the course of the film’s elongated stretches. With each new revelation, the film seems to morph into a slightly different genre than before.

As time has taught us, every misunderstood piece of art that missed its target upon release eventually finds its way into the arms of those it was intended for. The Empty Man has seen the compass leading people its way as of late. If you’re feeling a scratch within your brain or an ominous whispering guiding you in your sleep, it’s just The Empty Man summoning you to check out the odd delights it has in store.