The Empty Man (2020) *

 

Directed by:  David Prior

Starring:  James Badge Dale, Stephen Root, Joel Courtney, Marin Ireland, Aaron Poole, Samantha Logan, Sasha Frolova

Spoilers present, if you're interested.  

The Empty Man is another example of a movie which would go straight to VOD if it weren't for the dearth of movies being shown in theaters.   It is drudgery to sit through.   It is another tale of an ordinary man battling the supernatural.   Ever since Rosemary's Baby, the ordinary person loses 99 times out of 100 when taking on a supernatural being.   Maybe these folks should educate themselves by watching Rosemary's Baby, or even The Sixth Sense.   Surely, they've heard of those movies.

The Empty Man begins in 1995 Bhutan.   A group of hikers, two male and two female, climb the mountains and cross a rickety bridge.   One of the hikers falls into a hole in the ground, and his friend finds him sitting in a trance in front of a skeleton.    The friend is rescued and taken to a nearby vacant house, but he is catatonic.  Following a severe snowstorm, the hikers attempt to make their way back to civilization when one of the women suddenly stabs her friends to death and then jumps to her own death in a deep chasm.   Only the catatonic man survives, and he shows up years later hooked up to a machine in a Missouri hospital.   How he was rescued and brought there is not explained.

The story picks up again in 2018 Missouri.   We meet former St. Louis detective James Lasombra (Dale-from The Departed), who now owns a security shop selling mace and other like items.   He is haunted by the death of his wife and son in a car accident, and now his neighbor's daughter Amanda (Frolova) goes missing hours after talking to him about creepy stuff.   James decides to play detective again and find out Amanda's whereabouts.   This leads him to tales of the Empty Man, who can be summoned by blowing into a bottle and chanting his name, and a secret society which wants the Empty Man to appear again for reasons only they understand.  

The society itself isn't very secret, since James is able to Google it and retrieve all of the information he wants about it.   The farther down the supernatural rabbit hole James travels, the more demonic visions appear to him, and the more he lights up a cigarette to deal with the stress.   I suppose James doesn't need to run the store, since he abandons it the moment he starts his research into Amanda's disappearance.   However, he needs money to afford all of those smokes, so he has a conundrum perhaps worse than the one with Amanda. 

Movies dealing with the occult and demons who can be summoned at will are silly by nature, but it isn't against the law for them to be at least somewhat fun and suspenseful.    The Empty Man is dreary and hopeless.   Poor James Badge Dale provides more of a hero than the story deserves, and he is eventually swallowed up by the inane plot.   When it is told to James what his true nature is, all I could do is ask questions, which isn't what is desired from the viewer, but I asked if this was suddenly Weird Science disguised as a horror film.   The Empty Man is empty-headed.