Appeals to nostalgia are tricky things. At their worst, they’re smug, shallow surveys of clichés, attempts to reproduce a style or time period without capturing any of their soul. But at their best, they not only capture a specific aesthetic, but the mood and sensibility that accompany it. A truly affectionate look back gets the feeling right, along with the look. It feels less like somebody’s take on a bygone style of filmmaking and more like some recently unearthed relic from that period, a filmic artifact out of time.
The Void, fortunately, falls into the latter camp. It’s a very solid homage to 80s-era cosmic horror that contains a few missteps, but nothing serious. It’s suitably eerie, not just in its story and imagery, but also in a production design that makes it feel like an artifact of another time, rather than a modern attempt to ape a style. Much like the last movie I wrote about, Piercing, it feels like it could be a loving hi-def restoration of a cult classic.
We open on chaos, on what appears to be a murder in progress. Two men gun down a woman and set her body on fire. Another man escapes, wounded but not dead. The men resolve to pursue him. They don’t think he’s going to get far. Meanwhile, police officer Daniel Carter is finishing up his shift, getting ready to head back in for the night, when he spots that very same badly wounded man crawling along the road. Naturally he bundles him into his patrol vehicle and hightails it to the nearest hospital. It’s odd - the nearest one shouldn’t even be receiving patients, it’s a small community hospital that’s recently undergone a bad fire. But they’re listed as active and receiving and the next nearest hospital is over an hour away. This guy doesn’t look like he could make it another hour. So it’s an easy decision.
When he gets there, the hospital is all but deserted - it’s already small, but it’s staffed by a skeleton crew, one doctor, a couple of nurses and a nurse trainee. There’s a young woman - hugely pregnant - and her father, and that’s it. They hustle the badly wounded man into a room and get him stabilized. It’s apparent there’s some history between Daniel and one of the nurses. The doctor knows them both very well. It’s just another busy third shift at a hospital in a community small enough that everyone knows each other. Until the two men from the beginning show up at the hospital.
Until the figures in robes start to show up outside. Until the other nurse begins to…change.
Everyone is trapped inside the hospital by the mysterious figures outside (who are carrying what appear to be ceremonial but wholly functional knives) and threatened from within by something not really human, and so the basic backbone of the film is one in which the threats within and without become more insistent, there are revelations, some surprising, some not, and a sense that something cosmically horrible is coming to fruition. It’s difficult to tell if it’s a deliberate stylistic choice or a function of budget (or both), but the film really nails the grittiness of the kind of horror getting made in the 1980s away from slasher films, the darker, weirder, less-obvious stuff like
From Beyond and
Prince Of Darkness, the latter of which it’s especially beholden to in its siege-film setup and sense of persistent uneasiness and dread. It relies on lots of single-location shooting and practical effects (which are far more effective than I thought they were going to be), the lighting and film stock are period-appropriate (which again is as much about limited resources and technology as anything else) and the soundtrack is largely the kind of pulsing synthesizer that characterizes John Carpenter’s earlier films. All of this really does evoke the memories of a prior age to its benefit. There’s a nostalgia factor, sure, but it also feels like some kind of relic, a forgotten classic of the genre given new life, the kind of film half-remembered from 3am viewings on cable, where you can’t be sure if you actually saw the film or just dreamed it, isolated images from it stuck in memory. It’s a story about things from beyond space in time told in a style itself out of time.
But - and this is important - it isn’t slavish or winkingly self-referential in its homage. It plays things completely straight, like a film made in the 80s rather that a film about the 80s and so, period trappings regardless, it largely works as an eerie siege film that descends further and further into cosmic horror as it goes on. Not everyone is who they seem, time and space start to fray around the edges, and things with impossible biologies begin to crawl into our world.
As befits a film made on a very small budget, it does a lot of work with little things - stark imagery, sudden outbursts of violence, a reliance on suggestion over explicit depiction - that also serve to make it effective. It’s sort of a cliché that our imaginations come up with far more disturbing things than anything you can show us, but it’s a cliché because it’s true, and it does a lot of heavy lifting here. The filmmakers seem to know how much we can see before the artifice of practical effects becomes apparent, so all we get are glimpses of…things…and our imagination does the rest. There are a couple of instances where something’s on camera maybe a little too long, but not long enough or often enough to really undo the conceit entirely, and there are periodic hallucinatory interstitials that, although maybe a little more sophisticated than you’d expect from this sort of film, help to really cement the vibe when it starts to flag.
It’s got a lot of tricks up its sleeve, from sudden startling moments that break the quiet (not the same thing as a jump scare, of which there are almost none here) to mounting dread to plot twists and reversals, all of which serve to keep you on your toes, and it doesn’t really descend too much into cliché (at least not until the antagonist really starts monologuing, but more on that in a bit). By and large, the characters are believable - nobody’s wholly heroic or villainous or hyper-competent either way, just a bunch of people who are fighting back panic at being totally out of their depth, thrown into a situation nobody could possibly ever be prepared for. Hospital surrounded by robed cultists? Tentacled things sprouting out of bodies? Of course they’re freaking out, and they don’t get along all that well, for that matter. It never reaches the point that their failure to work together is their undoing, but their prickliness and discomfort feel real.
It does have some problems, though even these feel period- appropriate. The dialogue is pretty stagey throughout and painfully expository in places, mostly around filling us in on character background, very “you know he hasn’t been the same since his father died” type of stuff, and the quality of the acting varies somewhat across the ensemble, so some people feel more like characters in a movie, and others feel more like people. It can be a little distracting in the moment, but again, nothing that ruins the film. And, like a lot of horror films, it sort of loses its way in the final act, cutting between three groups of characters, one of whom may be starting to lose their connection to conventional space and time, so what had been a solidly constructed story starts to get really messy - the individual segments are good, but they’re sort of jumbled up in a way that makes the whole thing feel less uneasy than it could. And then in the denouement, the antagonist - who has had sort of a running monologue through the back half of the film, made sinister and effective by being presented in brief glimpses - sort of gets a bully pulpit toward the end and what was made creepy and unsettling by inference and suggestions turns into exactly the sort of villainous monologue you’d expect. Things also very much take a turn for the 80s toward the end in the set design and makeup, and it felt a little alienating and less visceral (ironic for some of what happens), like I was distanced from the film, thinking about the quality of the prosthetics and how aesthetically faithful it all was instead of being caught up in the film itself. But again, it’s a relatively small complaint and the film ends on a note that earns back a lot of goodwill.
It's a tough balancing act to pull off, to make something feel like an artifact of another time AND a satisfying horror film - after all, the sort of stuff we find terrifying as kids often doesn’t age all that well. But this really left me saying “man, if I’d seen this as a teenager I’d probably be shitting my pants.” It’s a film about a nightmare from beyond time that is itself a nightmare from beyond time.
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