I don't think I have figured out "The Empty Man" but I wouldn't say it left me feeling "empty" either. I also believe that like many of David Lynch's own labyrinthian puzzle pieces (his "Inland Empire" is still somewhat inexplicable to me), "The Empty Man" requires attention and patience and yet once we discover some of its hidden truths, we are still at a bit of a loss to understand what the film is saying.
The opening scenes, which last a good 25 minutes, didn't exactly strike a chord with me. Four hiking partners are walking through the cold and desolate Ura Valley in Bhutan. They are at a high elevation in the Himalays and one of the hikers, Paul, falls through a crevice on the mountainous rock (after all successfully walk through a dangerous bridge). Paul initially heard a distant noise, as if someone was communicating with him, and is found by his friends in a cave kneeling before a Lovecraftian skeleton with tentacles - it looks like a demigod to be worshipped. Paul is catatonic and is whisked away by his friends to some remote log cabin during a snowstorm. A tragedy results in two of the hikers getting slashed with a knife by Paul's girlfriend and then she purposefully plunges herself to the bottom of the mountain. Suicide or was she forced to do it?
"The Empty Man" is far more interesting and scary after that opening prologue when we are introduced to an ex-cop named Lasombra (James Badge Dale) who is investigating a series of murder-suicides where a cryptic phrase is written on a wall that reads "The Empty Man Made Me Do It." Of course, he is not a cop anymore but it doesn't stop him from checking out these strange cases, especially the disappearance of his next-door neighbor's daughter (Sasha Frolova, her cherubic face exists on some other plane of existence - good casting) who has that phrase written in blood on the bathroom window! Who is the Empty Man? Slender Man's Cousin? Who knows though he can be summoned by blowing onto a glass bottle on a bridge - that is part of the legend and sure enough, in one of the movie's two scariest sequences, someone is kicking bottles and making noise on the other side of the bridge. When Lasombra finds four kids that have hanged themselves at the bottom of the bridge, we know this entity or phantasm is not playing around. But what does the Empty Man want? Great question.
"The Empty Man" borrows or perhaps patterns itself after films like "The Babadook" and "The Ring" - both of which are more straightforward than this movie. But I do love ambiguity and debuting director David Prior has a lot of ideas about the metaphysical world and what is real and fundamentally true versus what is often punctuated through repetition that could just be a "refrigerator magnet" (some of this philosophy is provided by the leader of a terminally strange institute played by Stephen Root, a great character actor who is just as creepy as the guy he played in "Get Out"). Those moments of philosophical discussion really piqued my interest. On a narrative level with the main characters, I was far more invested in Lasombra and his pill-popping, heavy drinking stretches (he lost his wife and child in a horrible car accident), especially the fractured friendship between him and his neighbor Nora (Marin Ireland) - she also lost her significant other. Both James Badge Dale and Marin Ireland are so damn good, so honest in their portrayals of lost souls who try to repair their damaged psyches that a whole film just about them would've been grand. That is usually the mark of a good horror flick.
But by the time we reach the frenetic, heavy clicking sounds and deep-bass-tremors-in-the-soundtrack climax (I had some idea about Lasombra's possible true identity halfway through the film), I felt a little underwhelmed. That is not to say that the film's supernatural climax isn't stirring - it definitely is - but it negates the soul dimensions provided by Dale for his ex-cop Lasombra and the stunning Frolova for Nora's daughter. Despite the uninvolving prologue, there is much to admire in "The Empty Man" which has its share of scares and spooky atmosphere and it leaves you with a lot of questions (its philosophies will stay with me). After it ended, I just felt more hoodwinked than enlightened but definitely not disinterested.
