Horror/Mystery/Sci-Fi
1 hour and 30 minutes
Not Rated
Written by: Jeremy Gillespie & Steven Kostanski
Directed by: Jeremy Gillespie & Steven Kostanski
Produced by: Johnathan Bronfman & Casey Walker
Cast:
Aaron Poole
Kenneth Welsh
Daniel Fathers
Kathleen Munroe
Ellen Wong
There is a Hell. This is worse.
When it comes to tales of Lovecraftian inspired cosmic dread, the horror genre is entirely hit or miss. Films like Ridley Scott's Alien, Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and From Beyond (both direct adaptations of Lovecraft stories), Lucio Fulci's The Beyond and City of the Living Dead, John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, and of course Clive Barker's Hellraiser and its subsequent sequel Hellbound: Hellraiser II are all examples of cosmic horror done wonderfully right. However, when this theme is done poorly it is done in the most disappointing fashion, examples of this include Stuart Gordon's Dagon (another direct Lovecraft adaptation), all of Alien's sequels, most of Hellraiser's sequels, and of course Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery.
What exactly is a story of Lovecraftian inspired cosmic dread, though? For those who may be unfamiliar, turn of the century horror/science-fiction writer HP Lovecraft wrote stories dealing with, well, exactly that: cosmic dread. The notion that there are things that are older and wiser beyond our existence within the universe (or other universes or dimensions or whatever). The idea that mankind is merely a cosmic joke, an insect crawling across the ground holding no significance to the greater scheme of things, while something larger and perhaps more malevolent watches and waits to pluck the wings off of us. This, in the most simplified explanation I can write, is Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
The Void is one hundred percent a film that is interested in this kind of horror. It must be noted that this is entirely refreshing in this particular moment of cinema. Cosmic horror has not been explored heavily since the 1980s and even early 1990s. Today, the horror genre is interested in cheap, low-budget, slasher and ghost stories, preferably ones filmed entirely in the found-footage style of Cannibal Holocaust or The Blair Witch Project (the problem being that these often are nowhere near as intelligent as those two films). Other films have tried to push away from this, just like The Void. The Babadook brilliantly undertook themes of parental fears and anxieties and wove them into a story that is perhaps one of the best supernatural horror films ever made since The Exorcist and Suspiria. The Witch also attempted this, however, it surprisingly failed on many levels due to its promising opening sequences that unfortunately fizzled out into a boring, tensionless, conclusion that proved to be much more laughable than haunting. The Void, while admittedly not interested in making societal or human claims like The Babadook or Get Out, does succeed in its attempt to capture a story encapsulated in older genre conventions while simultaneously remaining something entirely new and different.
Seasoned horror fans will undoubtedly see references to films and filmmakers they are familiar with. Specific moments in The Void call to mind John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, Assault on Precinct 13, and The Thing, as well as the first two Hellraiser films. And it wouldn't be a true body-horror, blood and guts fest unless it made some sort of homage to the films of David Cronenberg. The film's denouement even feels like a direct reference to Lucio Fulci's The Beyond's similar conclusion. But here's the thing: the line between paying homage and blatantly ripping something off is very thin, and The Void manages to remain entirely within the homage camp purely due to its unique and different storyline.
And that's the most wonderful aspect about The Void: its story. While it will more than likely leave many audience members frustrated and perhaps even irritated, it cannot be denied there is nothing quite like it anywhere else. We live in a world where every horror film is riddled with spoon-fed explanations regarding their own plots. Audiences sit and wait until toward the third act of films where some character will patiently explain the madness of what was endured on screen for the past hour and a half to two hours. The Void, refreshingly, doesn't do this. It is a film purely out of Lovecraft's style, meant to make you wonder and walk away feeling disturbed, frightened, and shaken by what you just saw and yet not be entirely sure why. That is its most brilliant attribute, and it was one that has painfully been absent from the bulk of the horror genre now for decades.
Despite a low-budget, the film never feels cheap. Going along with the cosmic horror aspects, the creature effects are both executed and captured brilliantly. Undoubtedly, the bulk of this film's budget went into the special effects - the vast majority of which are done with practical effects work. These creatures and beings are truly horrific, gory, and amorphous things that will of course bring to mind tales of cosmic horrors one has read or seen in the past. Cinematographer Samy Inayeh captures these animatronic and puppet beasts brilliantly by hiding them in shadow, only dowsing them with light for the briefest of moments, and keeping shots of them mainly setup as close-ups, thus creating a disorienting feeling that the audience shares with the characters. Can we believe our own eyes? It's a terrific way to film the unexplainable - allowing the audience's mind to fill in eighty to ninety percent of the blanks. And while some effects work remains more impressive than others (the skinless doctor perhaps riding that previously mentioned line of homage and ripoff a little too closely to Hellbound: Hellraiser II) the overall effects work achieved in this film is absolutely astonishing.
Also done terrifically well is the film's direction. Like the tales of Lovecraft, The Void is a story about characters being forced to encounter a dark cosmic truth, one that - as they learn more and more about it - drives them further and further into madness. Questions and realities begin to form and fade away before the eyes of the film's characters and, by default, the audience. Again, this type of storytelling is hard to achieve on film, and yet filmmakers Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski handle it terrifically well. Moments where the camera violently shakes, the sound design cues us as viewers, the increasing lack of lighting, and of course the monsters and effects work are all things that help us as an audience to understand that this is a story driving toward a complex and inexplicable point - madness.
The performances within The Void are also handled well, and are actually quite believable. Considering there is no way of knowing how anyone could or would react in a situation such as this, the characters are developed enough through the performances and the slight backstories that we are given throughout for us as an audience to feel that these are authentic characters. Moments of humor and sarcastic comments are peppered in throughout the beginning of the film - which of course seems real given that many humans use humor and sarcasm to disarm horrific, violent, and unexplainable situations. As tensions rise and things become much more grave in their implications, of course the characters begin to comprehend the otherworldly terror they have been immersed in, and their reactions shift to purely survival based motivations. Each actor handles these shifts and deliveries with a great amount of professionalism.
While it will unquestionably leave some frustrated, irritated, and perhaps even disappointed - The Void is a motion-picture that, released in the current climate that the horror genre has become, is one hundred percent purely refreshing. Its callbacks to older cinematic films and filmmakers never seem like ripoff moments, and it may very well remain a quintessential example of how to film a pure Lovecraftian story of cosmic horror and dread in a brilliant manner.
9.5/10
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