The Empty Man (David Prior, 2020)

Horror is a profitable genre. It's one of the reasons low budget, independent horror has been fruitful since the 1950's. It's one of the reasons the genre exploded in the era of VHS. It's not so hard for investors to make their money back on a low budget feature. 

As for originality, it gives original filmmakers the opportunity to create genuinely original films. The lower the investment, the more likely a director is to get creative control of a film, and the more likely they are to finance genuine original films. It also means anyone with enough extra cash can put together a crew to try and cash on the genre's reliably strong fan base through cheap imitation of what has recently been financially successful. This leads to somewhere between thousands and millions of cheap imitations. Unfortunately, the aspect of imitation isn't just a feature low budget horror. Major studios certainly crank out their fair share of pale imitations. Often, the studios end up pumping out the cheap imitations of the successful independent films they would never have made or even films which ended up being independently produced because the studios wouldn't produce them. 

In a way, this is part of what makes The Empty Man so interesting. To be straight forward and up front, I don't know what I think about The Empty Man, other than to say it's interesting. I could come down on the side of being extremely positive about it, and I could also come down on feeling extremely lackluster about it. It depends almost entirely on the level of good faith or optimism I feel about the filmmaker's intent, and how much of what could be seen as its lesser aspects are a function of its themes.

There is an abundance to like about The Empty Man. Writer/director/editor David Prior, and co-editor Andrew Buckland, have an undeniably firm grasp on building atmosphere and crafting scares. The opening of the film, which serves almost as a prologue, would stand up as an excellent horror short, all on its own. There are a number of sequences and set pieces in the film which deliver chilling moments and creep outs. The cinematography helps deepen the sense of dread the script needs, and all of the performances are good, with one or two stand outs. There are some design aspects of the film which are outstanding, making for a few genuinely memorable images. There is some interesting, inventive sound design which works wonderfully too. 

I was pleasantly surprised that this isn't the film the trailer suggests, at all. I put off seeing this until now due to the combination of the film the trailer suggests and the run time. The Empty Man clocks in at two hours and seventeen minutes, and the chances the film the trailer suggests it would be could sustain for that run time are extremely slim. Thankfully, it isn't that film, and it does sustain its tension through the climax. 

That it isn't the film the trailer suggests, and the way it avoids being that film, is part of what ends up leaving questions about the intent. David Prior very clearly understands the horror genre, backwards and forwards, including its most popular sub genres. It uses tropes and audience expectations in ways that are consistently clever. This is where my feelings about it come to be a question of how much good faith I'm willing to project on Prior come into play. 

At each point in the story where the film has to either confirm it is going to follow the tropes of the sub genre it seems to be playing in, it does something else. It either turns toward a different sub genre or it takes a tack which isn't directly in keeping with those tropes, avoiding imitation, but is still so closely adjacent to not be genuinely original either. It's clever writing, and they are clever turns. There's an aspect of the story which relates to something like a collective consciousness, a repository of consciousness almost, and the generous reading of the film suggests this constant turning from one sub genre to another, the way certain bits of iconography are familiar without being outright imitation is a way of reflecting it in the world the film inhabits. If looked at in this perspective, it's genuinely good writing, and the film overall has something interesting to say. 

This is why the nature of the viewers perspective toward filmmakers is going to define how they feel about the film. This is definitely clever writing, with very strong filmmaking craft. Is it a bit too clever, and essentially replaying the same trick throughout the film? Maybe. Is it a film making a comment about the way ideas have always been "viral" and the way mass culture can create the thing it fears? Maybe. As a clever film, it is clever, but maybe slightly too obsessed with its cleverness. As a big swing, thematically driven and rich film, it falls a bit short, but I will always be generous to a filmmaker taking a big swing and trying to write something thematically interesting. There's not quite enough to suggest this is what the film is trying to do, but it may be that it just falls short or it may be that it wasn't ever the intention at all, and it was content to be a clever game of tropes. The game of tropes isn't as interesting to me, even as I do very much respect the quality of the filmmaking and that the twisting of these tropes is clever as the writing is concerned, it's much more satisfying when these are employed by a film that genuinely has something to say. I can definitely choose to read this in the way that's more interesting to me, and that reading is possible, whether or not it was David Prior's intention. In this, it's a fun film, but I can't say for sure it intended to be this fun or if it's intent was the much more boring film, self obsessed with its own cleverness.