Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Since I've given you guys two glowing reviews (The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Safe Neighborhood) and have a few more on the way (Arrival, The Handmaiden and The Girl With All The Gifts) I figured I'll throw out a more mixed reaction into the mix.
On paper The Void should be my favorite movie of the festival. It's like if Prince of Darkness had a baby with Hellraiser while one of them was playing one of the lesser Silent Hill games. While I can admire the ambition of the story and love the same kinds of movies the filmmakers (Manborg's Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski) do, the movie is a bit of a mess.
The Void is the rare movie where its greatest strengths are also its biggest weaknesses. Where the movie really succeeds is in striking a disturbing tone, but the problem is it's not its own tone. It's Hellraiser's tone. Or Prince of Darkness' tone. And the lifts aren't just subtle tonal nods, either. Scenes are lifted directly from those films (and others).
This is a big problem in low budget genre filmmaking right now. I'm seeing better films made more professionally at a lower budget than I ever have before, but I'm not seeing better stories. I'm seeing tracing of better material.
There's a conversation to be had about the moving, almost invisible line between using nostalgia effectively and just making photocopies of what you liked before. How could I be making these criticisms on this small genre film, but wholeheartedly adore Stranger Things? That conversation should probably happen elsewhere where we have a little more time to work through it, but my instinct is that it boils down to two things: subverting nostalgic expectation and impeccable character work.
Kostanski and Gillespie use solid horror archetypes, but they rarely twist them into something new. The evil doctor, the tough cop, the near-hysterical nurse. The one exception is what they do with the female lead and how they circumvent the traditional “damsel in distress” archetype. The payoff for that is way unexpected and one of the only genuinely interesting things in the movie to me.
The basic set up is that a cult traps a random assortment of people in a small town hospital that's closing down after a fire. There's a cop who brings in a mysterious injured guy, his soon-to-be ex-wife is a nurse at the hospital, their longtime family doc, a young interning nurse, a pregnant teen and her grandpa plus some random patients. Once they realize they're trapped in there weird Lovecraftian tentacle shit starts happening.
Practical effects take a front seat here, which is always something I'll give credit for, but it feels like their ambition far exceeded their resources. Many of the creatures look Spirit Store cheap. I'm not sure if the blame can be laid at the feet of the creature effects team or if the cinematographer didn't light them right, but I dug the design, just not the execution.
At the end of the day I find it hard to get too upset about this movie. It's not super shitty or anything, it just came across as a pale imitation of better movies with characters that weren't all that engaging. I'll give an exemption to Ellen Wong as the young nurse just there to help them pack up who ends up responsible for life or death surgery and can't help but freak out about it. Can't go wrong with Knives Chau in that situation.
I'm sure this will be a decent Netflix watch when you're in the mood for something Lovecraftian, but I don't like it enough to tell ya' to go out of your way to seek it out.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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