I often tout the importance of practical effects in genre filmmaking, even claiming that it saves otherwise dire tongue-in-cheek properties like Zombeavers and Stung from total tedium. The recent horror fantasy picture The Void made me question that devotion to my practical-effects-above-all-else ethos. At every turn, The Void disappoints as a feature film & a genre exercise, except that its classic, tactile 80s gore is gorgeous to behold. I left the film positive overall due to its visual artistry, but just barely. I was so close to souring on The Void from a scene to scene basis that I almost wish I had watched the movie on mute while folding the laundry & making phone calls. It was only worthwhile for its imagery.

A sort of Stranger Things cocktail of 80s-specific genre nostalgia, The Void stages a John Carpenter-style single location thriller at a small town hospital and tortures its characters within by way of a Clive Barker-style threat of otherworldly hedonism. Every character bottled up in this promising, go-nowhere plot can be boiled down to a single defining characteristic: The Cop, The Pregnant One, The Old Timer, etc. Their flat, emotionless line delivery, snarky post-Joss Whedon riffing, and dispiriting lack of character depth made me expect a twist that never came where the hospital setting would be exposed as an artificial environment, like in Southbound or Cabin in the Woods. No such luck. The only thing that opens up their hospital-set imprisonment is that one of them is some kind of occultist figurehead with access to hideous, beastly mutations and a titular realm of otherworldly horrors. Instead of playing like a threat, though, this villain is the audience’s only salvation from a bland group of inhuman forgettables, more of whom survive than I would have liked.

As bland as The Void is to listen to & absorb on a narrative level, it sure is pretty to gander at. It’s got everything: the impossible to define monstrosities of The Thing, the triangle-reverent mysticism of Beyond the Black Rainbow, the wooded threat of The Witch, the heavy metal hellscapes of Thor 2: The Dark World, the home invasion brutes of You’re Next, the personal nightmare visualizations of Event Horizon (just without the pesky outer space setting classing up the joint), etc. Just about the only thing The Void doesn’t have is an original bone in its body, getting by mostly as a Frankenfilm composed entirely from pieces-parts of horror cinema past. I frequently didn’t care about that nostalgia-baiting nature of the imagery, though, especially when it came to the Cronenbergian creature designs & Hellraiser 2: Hellbound visage of exposed muscle & nerve. The Void may borrow heavily from seemingly every movie that came before it, the reference points that comprise its feature length mixtape aren’t the easiest visual feats to pull off and the film ultimately gets by on the strength of its grotesque visual artistry, even if just barely.

I usually don’t require much, if any, verisimilitude from my practical effects-heavy gore fests about mutant beasts & alternate dimensions, but something about The Void’s detachment from reality bothered me. When an in-over-his-head sheriff from a small industrial town sees someone he’s presumably known his entire life shave off their own face & melt into an alien-looking creature, I expect at least a little bit of an emotional freakout, if not a violent puking & fainting combo. Since The Void is disinterested in that kind of recognizable humanity, its best bet would’ve been a reason or explanation why everyone was acting so oddly, even if a comically outlandish, campy one. As is, the human interactions feel like dead space placeholders between the film’s admittedly righteous horror film homages to past practical effects monstrosities. These visual achievements were enough on their own to make the film feel at least worthwhile, but not nearly enough to elicit any kind of genuine enthusiasm. If the characters within the film don’t care all that much about having their ranks torn apart by mutated beasts, why should I?

-Brandon Ledet