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The Void (Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski, 2016)

Major spoilers:

This was a nifty Canadian horror film which wears a lot of its 80s horror influences on its sleeve, but works well enough as a film in its own right. I may be being rather lenient towards it as it was just nice to see a horror film taking its cues less from torture horror and more from John Carpenter, Lovecraft and Silent Hill. With a bit of Lucio Fulci (the ending is pretty much directly from The Beyond, though the directors emphatically state that it is not in their commentary! Though its very much in the same vein and performing the same function, albeit with a bit of Stargate thrown in!) and Hellraiser (the race from a monster and collapsing corridor walls) thrown in there as well.

If I have a few nitpicks it is just that really none of the characters are particularly sympathetic (though I did like that the film knew exactly the right characters to kill off and allow to survive! And all the characters in the film are given little bits of business to define them, which is something that I wish I could take for granted in more films, but was grateful for here!). Maybe the lead character of the sheriff could have been made a little more sympathetic (when the representative of law and order is the most unstable one in a scene involving a face off between gun toting vigilantes and drug addicts, there is a slight problem! Or having a petulant response of bringing up their dead baby to his ex-wife as a reason for her behaviour!), but I also understand that we shouldn't really be sympathising with this troubled character entirely. But it did remove some of the tension, and add an extra layer to the bleakness, to realise that I did not particularly care about anyone surviving (except for the couple who do!).

The failure of authority figures to protect against really terrible things occurring seems like the theme of the film (as well as pregnancy, so even the fight over the dead child ties in), so I suppose that the sheriff character being foul mouthed and prone to angry outbursts felt thematically consistent. But I still would have liked to feel a bit more worried for the safety of any of the characters here than I ended up being!

The other nitpick is that while there are a lot of impressive practical monster effects here, of the type not really seen since the days of The Thing and From Beyond, there isn't much left for the monsters to do once they have revealed themselves in all of their gory glory. It seems that all of the attention has been paid to the build up to the reveal and then not to much to whether the monsters actually do anything interesting after that point. There's a bit of a need for the film to actually have a grand climax going beyond anything that the audience has ever seen before that it only partially delivers on.

But there are still a lot of interesting elements here. Lots of strange and evocative imagery - the hooded disciples holding everyone inside the hospital in perhaps a nod to the vagrants surrounding the church in Prince of Darkness; the opening credits playing out over imagery of the small town (like the opening of Carpenter's The Fog); and especially those brief flash frame images of starfields and constellations, and the view of the small town from a distance (there's a great use of camerawork in the film, keeping it at a disturbing long distance from a scene and slowly creeping in) with something appearing from the sky above.

It was also nice to see a couple of veteran actors in there: Art Hindle (who was in the original Black Christmas and the lead in The Brood) turns up briefly as a cop who gets tentacle molested and beheaded; and Kenneth Welsh turns up in a key role - who would have thought that the guy who played Windom Earle in Season 2 of Twin Peaks would turn out to be a shifty and manipulative character who steals the hero's love interest away inside another dimension?!

I don't think that The Void quite manages to reach the heights of its influences, but I found it impressive enough that someone was even attempting to try bleak interdimensional horror involving cults, mad doctors and tentacle monsters, so I was happy enough with it! Also for this being the director's first straightly played horror film after a few special effect heavy parody films (including one of the better shorts on The ABCs of Death 2, the 80s toy commercial-turned-similarly special effects and gore heavy W is for Wish), I thought that they nailed the more serious tone very well here.

I'll sign on to colinr's measured approval of The Void, which could have afforded to lean a bit harder into the cosmic imagery and overlapping realities to distract from some of its deficiencies in budget and acting but was mostly worthy of its many influences. Chief among these is Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, which is I think the major touchstone for this in more ways than colin alluded to above, particularly the climax.

To build on the complaint about the lack of likeable characters, I'd say the other frustrating element in the writing is that some characters behave inexplicably given their situation:

Spoiler

Just to cite a couple of examples: The father who chases the junkie into the hospital refusing to explain or even allude to his reason for being there, though there's no motivation for him to be so opaque, and the junkie attacking the protagonist for no reason except to allow him to be tossed to the mutated horrors in the basement.

Overall, though, far better to get an inconsistent film reaching for Carpenter than a perfectly executed homage to Eli Roth.

Yes, it was a shame that the potentially interesting subplot:

Spoiler

of the cult co-opting and using drug addicts in their invocation rituals, with the father and son-in-training teaming up to kill all of those (relatively) innocent victims without mercy

kind of fizzled out in shouting matches and threats before the film's attention moved onto other areas. Even the hooded cultists themselves felt rather unnecessary as anything more than a McGuffin to trap all the characters in the hospital (like Alice Cooper and his homeless buddies in Prince of Darkness!) Similarly the main plot of the cop and his nurse ex-wife could have used a bit more beefing up too, though I'm glad that it wasn't in some ways, as we've all seen that kind of plot before and it would have felt unnecessary in light of where the story takes its characters by the end. It felt as if a lot of the time the film was trying to play its cards a bit too close to its chest in terms of who was good and bad, who to trust, and where our sympathies as an audience should lie, but that sort of lack of particular connection to a specific character resulted in less of an impact when various characters met their end than there perhaps should have been.

But the imagery was good! Between this and Beyond The Black Rainbow (which I also have a few issues with, but similarly feel the problems are balanced out by the good material in there), I'm optimistic for the state of extra-dimensional, psychedelic, drug-trip Canadian horror in this decade!

What did everyone think of the look of the movie? I had a hard time getting passed the digital ugliness. Agreed that there's lots of great stuff in it, though.

I'm afraid that I didn't really note the digital nature of it! It is quite a dark and murky film after the first few scenes, but I thought that was handled well enough!