[4]

A motley group of townsfolk fall under siege at a nearly-abandoned hospital surrounded by mysterious, hooded cult figures brandishing knives. Before they can figure out who the cultists are or what they want, strange creatures start popping out of the shadows inside the hospital that like to eat and transform their victims. Also, the hospital has a weird secret lower level to it, where somebody bad is planning to do something even badder.

I really wanted to like The Void, but it was a very frustrating watch for me. For starters, I didn’t like any of the characters enough to care who lives or dies, and it doesn’t help that the actors are passable at best. In the absence of emotional investment, I tried to then latch onto a story that made some sense or some thematic elements that intrigued me. If the story makes sense, it’s lost on me. I think the writer/directors skipped a lot of groundwork by sweeping logic under the Lovecraftian rug. Whatever the cult figures have to do with the pregnant women have to do with the doctor whose daughter died have to do with the creatures in the morgue have to do with the triangle iconography… who can say? At best, the writers are really stretching things here.

I don’t need everything tied up with a bow, but I would like to feel like there was some effort to tie these ideas together. Instead it just feels like the writers sat down and came up with a laundry list of stuff they wanted to see in a movie, and then jammed them together in a screenplay haphazardly. My guess is they were hoping to distract audiences from trying to make sense of the story by blind-siding them with practical makeup effects and hyper-stylized photography. In other words, The Void felt very show-offy, all style over substance, all dressed up with no place to go. A great demo reel, really.

And that leaves thematics or subtext for me to latch onto. But I’ve thought about it for a while now and I got nothin’. In that department, the movie is as hollow as its title suggests.

This is when the movie tries to be ‘Hellraiser.’