In a late scene in David Prior’s debut horror film The Empty Man, the protagonist (played by James Badge Dale) abducts a man on a public street in broad daylight as part of his search for a missing woman. He sprays mace in the man’s face and shoves him noisily into the back of his jeep. He then surveys his surroundings to gauge his exposure, only to find that every single person within view is staring at their phones. Nobody noticed him at all.
In a film as strange as The Empty Man, this scene seems comparably anodyne, even a bit rote, yet it’s also helpful. It simultaneously offers a concise summary of the film’s absurdity and anticipates the public’s initially cold response to it.
The Empty Man is a difficult film to explain. “Horror” hardly begins to do it justice. Neither does “mystery” nor “conspiracy film,” though it has elements of both. The Empty Man’s concept can best be described as a compound of the winding narrative of The Big Lebowski, the mystical ambitions of Donnie Darko, and the weighty themes of more prestige horror films such as Hereditary and Relic, with an execution that recalls the botched production of Ishtar, even if The Empty Man, like Ishtar itself, is on the verge of a reevaluation.
The Empty Man opens with a cryptic preface that takes up nearly 30 minutes of the film’s over two-hour run time. In 1995, four hikers in Bhutan’s Ura Valley become stranded after one of them falls into a cave with strange skeletal remains and comes back up in a catatonic state, while another is terrified by visions of a large hooded figure stalking them. By the end of this film-within-a-film, all but one of the characters are quickly done away with, and that’s seemingly the end of it.
Cut to Missouri in 2018. James Lasombra (Dale), a retired policeman and grieving widower, is trying to find the daughter of his former lover (Marin Ireland) when several of her classmates at — I kid you not — Jacques Derrida High School turn up dead from apparent suicide. The departed students leave behind a message: “The Empty Man made me do it.”
What begins as a grim mystery soon balloons out of proportion as Lasombra follows a trail leading him to a cult modeled on the Church of Scientology, led by its own L. Ron Hubbard type (Stephen Root). This cult traffics in esoteric, vaguely Eastern spirituality in service of a grand cosmic vision: “They don’t have five-year plans,” as one character explains. “They have 500-year plans.” But the nature of those plans quickly becomes convoluted, requiring an appropriated mystical vocabulary — here, terms such as “noosphere” and “tulpa” make their appearance — to convey the existence of a conspiracy that seems to involve weaponizing universal consciousness to bring a transdimensional entity into our own plane of reality.
Films this ambitious walk a fine line between sleeper hit (Donnie Darko, Memento) and total obscurity (The Woman Chaser and countless others), with their fate decided by timing as much as anything. But bad timing was only the beginning of The Empty Man’s problems. The film shoot was hobbled by bad weather, the studio meddled constantly, and test screenings went badly. It was, bizarrely, marketed as a teen thriller, probably to trick viewers into associating it with the internet folk villain Slender Man. Its critical response was negative to nonexistent, and it grossed a measly $4 million after an inauspicious October 2020 theatrical release date. Director David Prior, moreover, insists that the released version was not a finished cut. With no hype, and with the stapler guy from Office Space as its biggest star, the film entered Amazon’s rental-only purgatory.
But something changed in the spring of 2021, as word began to spread about this unlucky film. The Empty Man suddenly attained something I thought had been destroyed by streaming: a word-of-mouth cult following. Suddenly, critics were less hostile — The Empty Man now has a positively dignified 73% rating at Rotten Tomatoes — and something approaching a fan base had appeared. Now, with its inclusion on HBO Max, it is reaching an even wider audience.
There is a kind of justice in this. The Empty Man is hardly a disaster. It’s beautifully shot, with some especially eerie use of basements, bridges, an abandoned campground, and a large, ragged teddy bear. The score (provided in part by industrial soundscaper and First Reformed composer Lustmord) is appropriately brooding. The performances are competent and natural; scene-chewing is kept to a minimum, and when it does appear, in some of the film’s more fanciful exposition, it seems to be intentional.
Still, Prior’s admission that the film is unfinished hangs over the viewing experience. Its structure is so unwieldy as to feel like several films stitched into one. Deeper themes, such as the weight of guilt and loss, the limitations of our perceptions, and the flimsiness of our individuality seem insufficiently explored, almost tacked on. The film even seems to lose track of who or what “the Empty Man” is supposed to be: One moment, it’s the entity. The next, it’s one of the characters who serves the entity.
What then makes this film so watchable? First, there is The Empty Man’s self-consciousness — not irony or detachment, as in the Scream series, but a tacit admission that although some of the film’s elements are patently ridiculous, they are also admirably audacious, and there’s nothing for its creators to do but own it.
Second is the sheer sense of adventure one feels watching this film — discovering new details, appreciating old ones, and enjoying a work of art that prefers to follow its own strange logic rather than bow to the demands of critical approbation (or basic coherence). The Empty Man does not rely on the visual perfectionism by which most ambitious horror is now judged. Intentionally or not, the film complements the chaos of the world it depicts. It prefers to be intense where its peers are sublime. When a cult member warns Lasombra that once the Empty Man (or whoever) crosses into our plane that “it’s going to be a bloodbath,” you can’t help but believe him.
Chris R. Morgan is a writer from New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter: @CR_Morgan.
