The Empty Man

I really like seeing horror movies during the month of October (I guess it is my way of getting in the mood for Halloween).  Last night I went to see The Empty Man because, despite having a similar plot to Slender Man which was absolutely awful, it sounded very intriguing to me.  It opens with a long (over twenty minutes!) prologue involving a group of hikers in the mountains of Bhutan who inadvertently discover a supernatural creature called the Empty Man which possesses one of them and then kills the rest.  Twenty-three years later, a group of Midwestern teens discover the urban legend of the Empty Man.  They perform the ritual to summon the mysterious creature and then they disappear.  James Lasondra (James Badge Dale), a former cop who is haunted by a recent tragedy, begins looking for Amanda Quail (Sasha Frolova), one of the missing girls, because she is the daughter of Nora (Marin Ireland), a woman who is somehow connected to his tragedy.  His investigation eventually leads to a cult-like organization, led by the charismatic Arthur Parsons (Stephen Root), which practices physical manifestation through the manipulation of thoughts.  Then there is an almost incomprehensible plot twist that focuses on the manifestation of a physical host for the Empty Man to possess.  The premise of this movie is extremely ambitious but it goes completely off the rails in the third act and I still don't entirely understand what happened because it is so convoluted and there are a number of plot holes and inconsistencies.  I did, however, find it to be very compelling and it kept my attention throughout the 2 hour and 17 minute runtime.  Even though The Empty Man feels more like a psychological thriller than a true horror movie, it incredibly scary because there is a feeling of dread that permeates every single shot and the atmospheric score adds greatly to this sense of unease.  Dale gives a strong central performance as a troubled man who is slowly drawn into something that he can't explain but begins to feel very personal and Root is fantastic as the cult leader.  This is definitely much better than Slender Man (the bar was pretty low) and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would but there are some problems that keep it from being a great movie.