The Void

There’s a scene in The Void when sev­er­al of the pro­tag­o­nists descend a flight of stairs and find a heav­ing mass of moan­ing demons bathed in red light. One might think that image speaks for itself – and yet some­one help­ful­ly points out, ​“This is hell!”

It’s that polar­i­ty of attempt­ing to inspire incon­ceiv­able fear and being anchored by mun­dane medi­oc­rity that defines this cos­mic hor­ror-thriller. Nei­ther restrained enough to be chill­ing­ly sug­ges­tive nor aggres­sive enough to be a roller­coast­er, The Void thuds to the ground in split­ting the difference.

Like John Carpenter’s The Thing or Prince of Dark­ness, the film com­bines a one-loca­tion siege with Love­craft­ian inva­sions of the satan­ic and super­nat­ur­al. A patrol­man (Aaron Poole) finds a blood­ied, sunken fig­ure in a road­side ditch, and takes it to a soon-to-be-clos­ing hos­pi­tal run by the avun­cu­lar Dr Pow­ell (Ken­neth Welsh).

No soon­er has Poole caught up with his nurse ex-wife (Kath­leen Munroe), and re-com­mis­er­at­ed with her over the loss of their child, than the pleas­antries are inter­rupt­ed by their mys­te­ri­ous patient lurch­ing into a berserk stab­bing fren­zy and mutat­ing into a ten­ta­cled ghoul. Mean­while a clan of shroud­ed mutes marked by tri­an­gle insignias assem­ble a men­ac­ing periph­ery around the building.

The two direc­tors have a back­ground in craft – Jere­my Gille­spie in art direc­tion, Steven Kostan­s­ki in prac­ti­cal effects – so the film’s drab, unas­sum­ing visu­al style is a sur­prise. And if the film­mak­ers know how to crib sit­u­a­tions from Car­pen­ter, what they miss from his influ­ence is a sense of pac­ing or atmos­phere. That’s for­giv­able to a point, if one assumes they’re try­ing to avoid pre­cious­ness and pitch a sense of direct­ness through the ambi­ence of DTV medi­oc­rity. But when the first intri­cate­ly designed slith­er­ing mon­ster appears at around the 20-minute mark, it’s nat­ur­al to start wish­ing for cin­e­ma of greater discipline.

The Void doesn’t have the patience to build great sus­pense before dol­ing out its first reveal, nor does it have the eye to make it spe­cial when it comes: to hide the bud­get lim­i­ta­tions, the crea­tures are seen in room cor­ners or obfus­cat­ed by flash­ing lights and cacoph­o­nous sound effects.

There are fur­ther devel­op­ments, includ­ing bizarre med­ical con­spir­a­cy and a por­tal into damna­tion, but they’re doled out amid a tedious scram­ble around the hos­pi­tal in which Poole and a group of con­fus­ing­ly imper­son­al and iden­ti­cal-look­ing men keep whis­per­ing around cor­ners and get­ting into scraps. By the end, when Poole and Munrow have blown the lid off an eter­nal-life con­spir­a­cy and stand on the brink of anoth­er dimen­sion, it’s been a grog­gy, fit­ful jour­ney to what’s sup­posed to be blind­ing revelation.

You may not only find your­self crav­ing the seedy ele­gance of Love­craft or Car­pen­ter, but also the jolt­ing live­li­ness of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead.