The Empty Man

There is no better feeling in modern cinema than being lied to by a marketing department and discovering a secret masterpiece instead. When the trailer for The Empty Man first flickered across my screen in late 2020, I wrote it off as another bargain-bin teen slasher—something following the dismal footsteps of The Bye Bye Man or Slender Man. It looked like a movie designed to be ignored, a generic urban legend flick dumped into theaters during the height of the pandemic by a studio (Disney) that had inherited it during the Fox merger and clearly had no idea what to do with it. Disney treated this movie like a radioactive potato, and I almost let it slip by.

I finally sat down to watch it on a Tuesday night while eating a bowl of lukewarm Honey Nut Cheerios that I eventually forgot to finish because I was too busy being paralyzed by the screen. What I expected was a 90-minute jump-scare festival. What I got was a 137-minute sprawling, nihilistic, cosmic horror epic that feels like David Fincher decided to direct an H.P. Lovecraft story.

The Greatest Prologue of the Decade

The film begins with a 22-minute prologue set in the Bhutanese Himalayas in 1995. This sequence is so self-contained and expertly crafted that it could have been a standalone short film. It follows four hikers who encounter something... wrong... in a snowy crevasse. The tension here isn't built on loud noises, but on a sickening sense of isolation and the way the wind whistles through the mountains. When we finally transition to the "present day" in Missouri, the shift is jarring in the best way possible.

We meet James Lasombra, played by James Badge Dale—an actor who deserves to be a much bigger star than he is. He’s an ex-cop grieving a massive personal loss, and he spends his days tinkering in his hardware store and looking after his neighbor, Nora (Marin Ireland, who was so haunting in The Dark and the Wicked). When Nora’s daughter goes missing after scribbling "The Empty Man made me do it" in blood on a bathroom mirror, Lasombra begins a private investigation that descends into a rabbit hole far deeper than any "urban legend" has a right to go.

A Fincher-Esque descent into Madness

Director David Prior spent years working on special features for David Fincher, and that DNA is visible in every frame of this film. The cinematography by Anastas N. Michos is clinical, cold, and wide. It captures the suburban landscape of Missouri as if it were a foreign planet. There is a specific scene involving a group of people sitting in a circle in the woods at night that is easily one of the most unsettling things I’ve seen in a theater in the last ten years. It’s shot with such a steady, unwavering hand that you find yourself leaning closer to the screen, even though every instinct tells you to look away.

What makes The Empty Man so fascinating in our current era of "elevated horror" is that it refuses to be just one thing. It starts as a slasher, turns into a procedural detective noir (think Seven or Zodiac), and eventually morphs into a full-blown meditation on Tulpa theory and ontological dread. It’s a film about how ideas can be as infectious and deadly as viruses—a theme that felt particularly pointed given it was released in 2020.

The score by Christopher Young (who did the incredible music for Hellraiser) and Lustmord is a masterclass in ambient terror. It’s less of a melody and more of a low-frequency vibration that makes your teeth ache. It perfectly complements the film's central mystery: Is the "Empty Man" a ghost, a monster, or just a thought that won't go away?

The Curse of the "Dumped" Movie

It’s a minor miracle that this movie exists at all. The Empty Man was filmed in 2017 and sat on a shelf for three years while the Fox/Disney merger sorted itself out. Because of the delays and the pandemic, there was virtually no press tour. It arrived stillborn at the box office, grossing less than $5 million. In the era of franchise dominance, a two-hour-plus R-rated horror film with no recognizable IP is a hard sell, but seeing it fail so spectacularly on a commercial level is heartbreaking because it is the exact kind of ambitious, weird-as-hell cinema we claim we want.

Apparently, the production was so troubled that David Prior had to fight to keep his cut from being sliced into a standard 90-minute teen thriller. I’m glad he won. The length is exactly what gives the film its power. It lets the atmosphere breathe. It lets you get lost in the investigation alongside Lasombra until you realize, along with him, that the mystery isn't something you solve—it's something that consumes you.

If you’re looking for a fun Friday night flick to watch with a group of friends who want to scream at jump-scares, this isn't it. But if you want a movie that will sit in the back of your brain for a week, making you question the shadows in your hallway, The Empty Man is essential viewing. It’s a dense, challenging, and deeply frightening piece of work that was nearly buried by its own studio. Go find it on a streaming service, turn the lights off, and for the love of God, don't blow into any bottles you find on a bridge.

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The Empty Man is currently available for digital purchase and is occasionally spotted on various streaming platforms like Hulu or Disney+ (depending on your region and their mood).