THE VOID (Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski). 90 minutes. Opens Saturday (April 1). See listing. Rating: NNNN
Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski’s previous features, Manborg and Father’s Day, were elaborate riffs on the genre movies they’d grown up watching.
And while their productions certainly entertained on a superficially nostalgic level – yup, low-budget prosthetics sure were cheesy back in the day! – that veneer kept them from coming fully to life.
Ironic recreations are pretty hard for an audience to invest in or take seriously they can never exist on their own terms.
In The Void, Gillespie and Kostanski are still operating in their referential comfort zone, but this time they’re playing it straight.
A thriller about a small-town cop (Aaron Poole) who delivers an injured man to a remote hospital only to find himself besieged by inexplicable horrors within and without, it’s a savvy mashup of at least four John Carpenter pictures. But it’s also its own entity: an effective, resourceful nightmare that convinces you the apocalypse is clawing just out of sight, beyond the edge of the screen.
It’s also really well-cast, and Poole, Kathleen Munroe, Art Hindle, Kenneth Welsh and Scott Pilgrim’s Ellen Wong go above and beyond the requirements of this sort of thing.
You think they’re playing types – and they are, sort of – but there’s just a little more going on beneath the surface, which feeds into the movie’s gathering tensions very nicely.
This was a very pleasant surprise.
