Writer-director David Prior’s adaptation of Cullen Bunn and Vanesa R. Del Ray’s comic series, The Empty Man, was never aimed at a mass audience. It’s not a Marvel property. It’s ephemeral, and rather than giving the viewer resolution, it purposefully obscures its message. The audacious choice to open with a 20-minute prologue unrelated to the plot is downright Kubrickian.
Prior’s The Empty Man is filled with textual references only an English major could love (Jacques Derrida High School, Friedrich Nietzsche quotations, and the title of a Flannery O’Connor story scrawled on a chalkboard are but a few examples). Prior’s courageous artistic vision alienated critics, and The Empty Man joins good company among horror films as a unique and insightful work of art that the narrow critics were simply wrong about. The Empty Man opened in October 2020 to negative reviews and a subsequent poor box office performance.