The Void (2017)

Directed by Steven Kostanski & Jeremy Gillespie

Viewed on Shudder

Man, you know what movies are good? Movies from the 1980s! Movies about weird creatures and body transformations and disgusting monster flourished during the 80s and I absolutely love those kinds of movies. Body horrors like The Fly, Hellraiser, The Thing, really caught my attention and shaped the kind of movies that I seek out and love today. Why bring this up now? Well, that’s because the movie I’m talking about today, The Void, is doing everything it can to nestle itself into that same kind of body horror goodness that made those previous movies I mentioned classics. But does The Void rise to the same heights as its beloved predecessors? That’s exactly what I’m going to answer today!

   Before I try to answer that, let’s briefly go over the plot of the film! The Void centers on a small town sheriff who comes across an injured man stumbling through the woods and brings him to the nearest hospital, a mostly defunct building that’s been heavily damaged by a fire. Once there, things go very wrong very fast. Odd things begin happening to people in the hospital, mysterious men show up who have a beef with the injured man, and a crowd of white-robed figures with symbols on their hoods suddenly appear outside the hospital. That isn’t even the beginning of this bad night though, as it becomes clear that this group isn’t alone in the hospital and what they run into isn’t very friendly.

   One thing that I mentioned a bit earlier, and that I should make abundantly clear, is just how fast-paced this film is. That plot summary up there barely covers the first twenty to twenty-five minutes of the movie, but it feels like it goes by very quickly. Now I don’t want movies to drag on and on but that is something that slightly bothered me about The Void as a whole, it seemed to want to get right into the action quickly and I can’t quite figure out if this is a good or a bad thing.

   For a lot of reasons, it is a wonderful change of pace to have a film want to show you how cool it is very quickly. This is barely a spoiler but there are monsters in this film, and let me tell you, they are AWESOME. The creature effects here are fantastic! Creative designs, strong execution, and good framing really highlight the gross disgusting nightmare creatures who show up pretty early in the film. I love how proud the production team is of their monsters, and they have every right to be, but I am a little bit torn on how they use the first monster that we see. It is really creepy and well designed but I wonder if it was used too early? The first monster shows up maybe thirty minutes into the movie and I don’t think there was really enough buildup to justify playing their hand so soon. It hurts me to type that though because the gorehound special effects monster lover in me was just doing backflips as to how convincing and cool this monster looked.

   As I briefly mentioned before, the pacing here is very quick, which is good in a lot of ways, I was never bored during the movie or waiting for anything to happen, which is great, but some of the setups felt a bit clumsy. There’s this kind of complex relationship web established incredibly quickly early on between the sheriff, the nurse that he is married to but currently has a rocky relationship with, and the only doctor still left at the hospital, and it is an interesting group of relationships. There’s an intergenerational thing where the doctor is an older man who knew the sheriff’s father, who is stated to have been a much better sheriff than our hero is but ultimately died in the line of duty, and a link between him and the married sheriff/nurse pair because they have all lost a child, and that presumably is what caused the strained relationship between the sheriff and nurse. That being said, all of this information is given to us really quickly in the first act and it felt a bit rushed. Brief sidebar, if, during character establishments, someone uses the phrase, “As you know…” when describing a thing they both know, I immediately roll my eyes because I don’t think anyone says that without being sarcastic or purposely dickish.

   To speak a bit more about the characters, without giving too much away, I really liked the dynamic that everyone had at the beginning of the film, especially the nurse and sheriff. There’s a lot of good ideas for meaningful character drama there, especially with the group of characters they end up being trapped with, who include a heavily pregnant young woman, a doctor who also lost a child, and two dudes who burst in with a serious bone to pick with the injured man the sheriff picked up earlier. Everything seems great but I don’t think The Void seized all the potential it had with this strong cast of characters. We don’t get enough of a resolution to the nurse and sheriff’s issues and although we learn more about all the other characters, none of their stories are too engaging and some of them are kind of thinly written.

   None of what I just mentioned is a huge problem for enjoying the movie though, because I was having such a good time with everything else here. The location, a partially burnt out hospital in the middle of nowhere, has such great atmosphere to it that I was just focusing on how great The Void looked and how creepy everything was even before shit really hit the fan. Sidenote, I find hospitals scary in real life, so that may influence my love for them in horror settings. I already mentioned this before, but the monster designs we see are insanely good. Creepy, disgusting, well shot, and varied, this production team knew exactly what they needed to do to make this movie really memorable and give the people what they wanted. Basically, all my other criticisms of the script or pacing can be easily countered with, but the monsters were so cool and the atmosphere is awesome!

   At the end of the day, The Void is a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be, a horror movie in the style of the elaborate and well crafted practical effects extravaganzas from years passed and it mostly succeeds at it. It never quite reaches the heights of masterpieces like The Thing, but I never really expected that from a movie that clearly had a lot of limitations in budget and scope. Cleverly, these limitations were handled well, sticking with mainly one location and focusing on what they knew would be key to The Void succeeding, the great looking visual effects. The Void may not play to the widest audience, but if the idea of an atmospheric horror film with disturbing monsters that stick with you sounds interesting, you should definitely give this a watch!