For a while in the two hour and seventeen-minute runtime, The Empty Man seems content to stretch out its entire feature-length on the simple setup of a formulaic cursed urban legend. You summon it, then three days later, you die. There are no established rules beyond this, nor does the entity itself have much of a presence. Prior is so interested in keeping the Empty Man and its legend shrouded in mystery that the narrative fights to maintain cohesion. Worse, it struggles to fill in increasingly large gaping voids in the plot. It’s a series of different movies crammed into one, all connected by a dreary style and tone that makes its lead sleepwalk through his investigation.
[Review] Overlong ‘The Empty Man’ Fills Emptiness With Boredom – Bloody Disgusting
… you’ve been warned, SPOILERS ahead …
Fitting to keep the critique text to minimum
It says something that a month or so after seeing this, I’ve already forgotten most of it. Some of it returned as I read others reviewing it. The whole thing was a chore to watch, but having decent concepts. Just way too darn long for the story.
Reviews by Others
What do others think of The Empty Man?
Recommended
- Drink In The Movies: “…isn’t a great film, I’d likely concede in conversation that depending on your preference for cinema it may not even be good film. However I find myself having loved the experience of watching it.”
- lcook (3.5/4): “Based on the Boom! Studios graphic novels by Cullen Bunn, this film scared the living daylights out of me, with disturbing images, concepts and sounds that are hard to shake.”
Not Recommended
- King’s Movie Reviews (6/10): ” It’s just shy of being a two and a half hour movie, which is crazy for a movie labeled a horror film, I can’t think of another one with that run length. Even a really scary one, if it’s not a very solid story, it’ll lose peoples interest. This is what happens with ‘The Empty Man’, it’s a great story but not strong enough for the run time. If they trimmed the fat, it would be an amazing film, but it’s about 45 min or so too long”
- Mirza Baig: “…just overcompensates in every corner resulting in a film that is needlessly long and filled with philosophical overtones, forcing you to question the identity of the audience the film was supposedly targeted at.”
- Movie Meister Reviews / Lee Butler: “…spends most of the time just running on fumes, it has no good ideas or clever shocks or even any actual horror that’s worth a damn. It just wastes time, I can’t even get the energy to actually hate this movie, hate would imply that it left a mark of some kind and I doubt I’ll even remember this one by the time this review goes live, that’s how boring and useless this movie is”
- Movie Minutes / Jordan Peterson: “…is the latest in a line of Candyman rip-off’s (Candyman himself being reminiscent of one Frederick Krueger), a supernatural slasher who subconsciously stalks and kills his victims. Despite its similarly stupid title, The Empty Man is a slight cut above such irredeemable disasters as The Bye Bye Man (2017) and Slender Man (2018).”
- redmangoreviews: “…Slender Man’s cousin, is a strange sort of movie. On the one hand, it has solid acting, an intriguing mystery and some well-thought out scares. On the other hand, it tries so hard to be complex it ends up leaving you with more questions than answers.”
- Society Reviews (2.5/5): “…flirts with being a solid B film, there are some editing issues such as sound and cutting down on its runtime which would have improved the film’s quality. A film that doesn’t lack ambition simply doesn’t live up to its potential.”
- Surgeons of Horror: “…we’re armed with a toothpick, the ground is made of wurtzite boron nitride, and the plotline is so tangled in its own web, there’s no saving grace for our protagonist or the audience”
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