Deputy Daniel Carter is out for a typical shift, but suddenly runs across a retreating drug addict in the road, who is injured and appears to be rather frantic and flustered. He takes the young man to a nearby hospital, where his ex-wife works as a nurse alongside various people with different professions, and due to a raging fire in the past, has been left largely abandoned. While the stranger recovers in one room, Daniel comes across one of the caretakers after she has murdered a patient for presumably no reason. He shoots her in self-defense once she begins to approach him with her weapon while spouting crazy rhetoric, but passes out from a seizure. After regaining consciousness, morbid and unusual incidents begin to occur around the vicinity, which include the appearance of several mysterious hooded figures outside, and the emergence of two men whose brief knowledge of these incidents, as well as their shocking recognition of the hospitalized junkie, could ensure their survival.
Can overhype kill a product for you?
Many a time has this thought crossed my mind, and more often than not, I've had to reply with a meek, slightly saddened "yeah." This initially occurred with 2008's Martyrs, of which I will admit to liking a lot more the second time after I watched it nearly ten years later. So, perhaps the same will be said with the Canadian production The Void, which has been garnering a lot of critical praise, though not without some detractors along the way. And today, I guess that I have to count myself as someone sort of stuck in the middle.
The Void came into existence through popular crowdfunding website Indiegogo, where it amassed a fairly good goal of $82,510. I can respect the pseudo-DIY aesthetic of films such as this one, along with predecessors such as The Deadly Spawn and the relatively-recent "The Death of Superman Lives." I also admire the filmmakers' decision to stick with the much more engrossing and flat-out creepier choice of utilizing practical effects over CGI. Despite not adhering to the belief that computers can't produce scares or thrills, I'm still unapologetically attached to what I grew up with. It gives this little production a great sense of style, with an emphasis on upping the insanity to a level that the average viewer may not normally be able to comprehend (and distracts from a messy plot). The Void is also shot fairly well, choosing to keep its more suspenseful sequences/monster revelations as dimly-lit as it can (though its smaller budget may have played a part in that), and they manage to capture the mood of something straight out of the latter half of the 1980s.
So with all of those working in its favor, why did it stumble for someone such as myself? I suppose that a large portion of that comes down to two quite important aspects that made its influences so beloved. The first is its cast, and what The Void has in visually-pleasing treats, it sorely lacks in the character department. Nobody here feels particularly memorable, or even remotely developed. There's the typical main hero with a tortured past (who's combined with another cliché in the form of the perplexed cop), his ex who he may or may not still be on good terms with, a stranger who knows more about this scenario than he is letting on, and many more that just kind of left me feeling as if they forgot to flesh them out before shooting began. Kudos for digging Ellen Wong of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World fame out of obscurity though. The second is that even with penning such a great love letter to the movies of yesteryear, it just feels like blatant pandering for most of its running time. Yes, we know that Prince of Darkness and From Beyond are pretty cool, but if you're just looking for a mishmash of John Carpenter and H.P. Lovecraft, there's already a film out there than did this a lot better and (somehow) had a less confusing narrative to boot. Had The Void been given a wide release, the field day that someone such as RedLetterMedia would have with it would have been grandiose. If all that your product manages to accomplish is make you wish that you were watching those flicks over your own, then I'm not quite certain as to whether that's a good thing or not. Nostalgia worship is fine, but as I said in my review for Death Machine, it does get to be a bit much way sooner than it should.
Ultimately, The Void is an eye-catching, though fairly hollow motion picture that doesn't have a great deal more to offer once you take away its effects work and Lovecraftian imagery. I've always said that what good is a delicious-looking three course meal if the food itself tastes fairly average? I genuinely feel bad saying anything negative about passion projects, especially if the intentions were good and you can tell that those behind the camera really know and love their field. But in the end, I just kept asking myself about why I wasn't just watching one of those many influences instead of this. Maybe a second screening down the line will make me change my mind. As of October 2017, The Void is available to view on Netflix and is readily available for purchase on DVD and Blu-ray.
Just don't make the mistake of going for that other motion picture with a similar-sounding title instead. That's a different kind of frightening.
Tomorrow, we stick around in 2017 and decide to grab ourselves some sweets of the more sinister variety!
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