The Empty Man: Image And Substance

“Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long”

        - T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Marketing is a hell of a thing. I get that you need to on some level convince audiences to come see your movie, and part of doing that is trying to convince them that it’s going to be good. I don’t think I’m offering any penetrating insight on that front, but goddamn is it annoying when the marketing for a film frames it as one type of film when it’s really another. Maybe I’m still feeling burned by discovering the hard way almost thirty years ago that Muriel’s Wedding was not, in fact, a romantic comedy about a young woman’s love for Abba, but The Empty Man is marketed as yet another movie about a bunch of kids who mess with a Bloody Mary-style urban legend and get more than they bargained for. And it’s not that.

Well, it’s not not that, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a brooding, unsettling journey into something much bigger and darker than that, and it’s a lot smarter than its ostensible premise might lead you to believe.

The film opens on four friends taking a hiking vacation in Bhutan. They’re trekking through remote villages and up into the mountains. It’s slow going, and just when they’ve gotten far away from the nearest village, one of them takes a tumble down a crevasse. He’s not okay, and there’s a huge snowstorm coming in. They find shelter in an abandoned house and things…start to get strange. They don’t end well.

An indeterminate amount of time later, in Webster Mills, Missouri, James Lasombra is living the life of a man whose wife and child are gone. Long hours at his store selling security equipment, an especially depressing birthday dinner by himself at a Mexican chain restaurant, rattling around inside a house too big for one person. It isn’t clear right away what happened to them, but whatever it was, there’s a lot of tiptoeing around it between him and Nora, his neighbor. As it turns out, Nora’s daughter has gotten involved with some new-age self-help group and has apparently discovered the secret to transcendence. You know, like you do when you’re young. And then she disappears. Local law enforcement isn’t rushing to do anything, though, because Nora’s daughter is 18 and appears to have packed up and taken a bunch of her clothes and possessions. Nothing about this says foul play, and she’s old enough to make her own decisions. But Nora feels like something’s wrong, and James - who used to be a police officer- agrees to do some digging.

Starting with the phrase “The Empty Man made me do it,” written in blood on the mirror.

For a film that’s supposed to be about a bunch of teens running afoul of an urban legend, it’s pretty audacious in its construction. The prologue in Bhutan is about the length of a short movie on its own - to the point that I paused to check that I had the right film - and it puts some pieces into place that the film takes its sweet time to pay off. In fact, that’s probably one of the film’s bigger strengths, that it’s not afraid to take its time. It rarely feels like it’s dragging or spinning its wheels, but it is a very deliberately paced movie, very careful and spare. There’s not a lot of dialogue, mostly short, economical conversations that don’t get too stagey, and the performances are consistently on the low-key side of believable. It uses a lot of shots with little to no dialogue to communicate details - the sequence where James spends his birthday by himself in a Mexican restaurant is a great example. It’ s both comic and deeply sad and works as an economical sketch of what his life is like, even sneaking in some details that become more important later. There are a lot of little character touches like this, and the film is especially good about doing exposition through glimpsed details and asides, the kind of exchanges people with a shared past actually have, fragmentary flashbacks that feel like shards of past intruding on the present. It's exposition inferred rather than laid out plain and contrived.

It’s also not what you’d call a loud movie, in the sense that it doesn’t really go for jump-scares or melodrama. There are moments of violence, but they’re largely brief and sudden, otherwise unaccompanied by any fanfare, over as quickly as they begin. The score is mostly cold ambience, like a winter wind and the cracking of icicles, and it’s a shadowy film - there are a lot of single light sources creating oases in the middle of darkness, people moving in and out of light. It’s less concerned with scary moments than it is a constant, sinister hum, a feeling that something isn’t quite right. This isn’t a movie that jumps up and screams in your face, this is a movie that sneaks up from behind you, leans over and whispers terrible things in your ear. The quiet, spare, approach and deliberate pacing mean it gradually unspools, taking a winding path where gradual recollection and revelation play out against a landscape that feels like a trip down a rabbit hole - we’re in Bhutan, then we’re in Missouri, a hiking trip goes wrong, then a bunch of kids start going missing, there’s an urban legend involved, and that somehow opens up into something else entirely, like James wandering impossibly deeper and deeper into the bowels of an old building downtown, these strange secrets stretching farther than anyone would expect. And it just keeps twisting and spiraling into some pretty unexpected places - there are nods to postmodernism, Tibetan mysticism, cosmic horror, and it hangs together well, self-assured and quietly chilling.

On the downside, the deliberate pacing extends even to the end, which could have been tighter - it’s long enough from the big reveal to its culmination that by the time it gets where it’s going, a lot of the impact has been lost and it feels more like a foregone conclusion than anything else. In that sense, it kind of ends not with a bang, but a whimper. But the ride to get there is surprisingly good - smart and restrained and atmospheric as all get-out. I often find myself watching otherwise disappointing movies and thinking how much better their basic premise could have been in better hands. This time I came away feeling like I’d seen what could have been a really tired, obvious premise done really really well, like a gourmet version of a White Castle slider. The marketing promises junk food, but you get cuisine.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon