The Empty Man (2020)

The Empty Man is the rare studio horror film that dares to be genuinely strange: it starts like a missing-person mystery and quietly mutates into something cosmic, dreamlike, and unsettling in a way you can feel in your bones. David Prior directs with a patient, confident hand, building dread through atmosphere, precise visual craft, and a soundscape that makes silence feel dangerous, while James Badge Dale grounds the whole descent with a bruised, believable performance. The vibe is slow-burn and hypnotic rather than jump-scare-heavy, the kind of movie that rewards surrendering to its mood and letting its ideas wash over you. If you want tidy answers and a brisk pace, it may test you—but if you’re hungry for ambitious horror that swings for the uncanny and lands more often than you’d expect, it’s absolutely worth the trip.

The Empty Man is clearly aiming for a slow-burn, occult-tinged mystery that starts like a classic urban-legend horror and then swerves into bigger, stranger ideas about cults and identity. The problem is it doesn’t so much build momentum as sprawl—after an excellent opening stretch, the story keeps piling on threads, rules, and detours until it starts to feel unwieldy and a bit self-important. If you need tight pacing, clean answers, or a payoff that feels satisfying rather than “wait, that’s it?”, this will likely test your patience over its long runtime. Still, if you’re in the mood for an atmospheric, ambitious horror puzzle with some genuinely eerie imagery and you don’t mind uneven storytelling, there’s enough here to justify a late-night watch.