THE EMPTY MAN

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND BAFFLEMENT

Some people - and by "some people" I mean some of Film Twitter - are wondering just what happened here. Why did this movie disappear from view, why did it wash up on the Disney+ streaming service, why didn't it get a proper decent release as befits a horror movie of its stature and ambition? Well, I'm no expert, obviously, but my guess is that the marketing department took one look at it and muttered "what the hell are we supposed to do with this?". In the end the promo boys have ignored the first and third acts and postered it as a bog-standard teen bogeyman movie which it absolutely isn't.

That second act, a perfectly ordinary creepypasta in which half a dozen bickering highschoolers perform the silly bottle-blowing ritual that supposedly summons the titular Empty Man, is actually over all too quickly. Grieving ex-cop James (James Badge Dale) gets involved when his neighbour's daughter, one of the gang, disappears leaving a cryptic message in blood on the bathroom mirror. So far, so comfortable: this is fairly familiar territory. But then the trail suddenly veers off to a bizarre, smiley-sinister cult called the Pontifex Institute (no apparent significance, but @Pontifex is the Twitter account for the Pope), a cabin in the woods and an old man in the hospital regularly visited by the cult's acolytes...

Sadly The Empty Man all adds up to not much and the overlong result (some two hours and twenty) is a huge disappointment. It's a shame because there's some good stuff in there, particularly in the opening sequences in Bhutan where one of a group of hikers falls down a crevasse and discovers a bizarre skeleton which is one of the genuinely creepiest-looking things I've seen since whatever the hell was in the bag in Possum. Strangely, the whole Bhutan section is over after twenty minutes and barely referred to again, leaving it as almost a standalone short, which is a pity because it's the most interesting section of the film. The odd and slightly disturbing behaviour of the cult members round the campfire is also very effective. These are isolated moments, true, but they are moments which work well.

One of the last films to come out with the famous 20th Century Fox searchlights at the start, The Empty Man has actually been around for a while and although it's a brand new arrival on the streaming platforms it's actually got a copyright date of 2018. Closer to the power of The Wicker Man than the mess of Slender Man (or the barely memorable The Bye Bye Man), it is undeniably fascinating. It's nice that it largely eschews modern horror's reliance on scaryface jumpcuts and crashing dischords on the soundtrack, going for the odd and uncomfortable and telling a much larger and potentially apocalyptic story - what's scarier than a church which  does actually has a God? But I could have done with a few more concessions to mainstream: for example, the film's name-checking French deconstruction philosopher Jacques Derrida, to whom some of the Pontifex Institute's membership questionnaire apparently refers, isn't even slightly explained by stodging through Derrida's word salad of a Wikipedia page.

Okay, maybe that's just me being a bit thick (and I should be the last to complain about word salads). But it doesn't take away from the sense of disappointment that crucially it's not that scary: I watched it alone in the dark from about 10.45pm onwards and then had an untroubled night's sleep, never once wanting to put the lights on. I did want to like it (obviously - why watch it otherwise?) but I was left with a profound sense of underwhelming meh and the marketing didn't help it. Others are finding more in the film than I did, and it might already have the makings of a cult movie (in all senses of the word "cult"), but it never connected with me.

**