The Empty Man (2020)
Directed by David Prior
No — The Empty Man is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Empty Man arrives from 2020 with the weary dignity of a film buried before anyone bothered to look at it.
Consciousness Markers
The cast includes some minority actors, but they exist naturally in the story without any commentary or deliberate representational framing; per criteria, this does not count.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext are present.
Female characters appear but the film does not advance a feminist agenda or critique patriarchy.
No engagement with racial identity, racism, or racial justice themes.
No environmental or climate-change themes.
The cult is a supernatural/religious entity, not a critique of capitalism or wealth inequality.
No body-positivity themes or fat-acceptance messaging.
Mental illness and trauma are depicted as horror elements, not as neurodivergent identity or advocacy.
No historical revisionism; the story is fictional and not engaged with reinterpreting real history.
The film delivers exposition about its cult and cosmic horror mythology, but no social or political lecturing.
Why it received this score
The Empty Man arrives from 2020 with the weary dignity of a film buried before anyone bothered to look at it. David Prior's debut follows James Lasombra, an ex-cop grieving a dead wife and son, who investigates a missing girl and stumbles into a cult, a bridge ritual, a Bhutanese cave skeleton, and the concept of the tulpa. The studio lost faith, the test screenings went badly, and the marketing amounted to a shrug. Years later, cinephiles dug it up and declared it a cult object. That is the familiar arc for an overlong, ambitious horror picture, and the film earns the reappraisal on craft alone.
What the film declines to do is lecture. Its cult worships a nameless cosmic entity that feeds on grief, which is a theological arrangement, not an economic one. There is no indictment of wealth, no climate anxiety, no argument about representation. Women appear throughout, including a widowed neighbor and a teenage girl who turns out to be far more than a runaway, and the film has no interest in making them symbols. Grief, alcoholism, and dissociation are rendered as instruments of dread, not as conditions requiring a social program. The cast is varied in a manner that feels incidental, which is to say the film simply hired actors and let them act.
None of this is a complaint. A horror film about a thought-form assembled from a stranger's pain does not owe us a thesis on the housing crisis. The empty man is empty of ideology as well as identity, and that is why the thing works. We are left with a competent, strange, occasionally interminable exercise in cosmic dread, and a cult following that formed without a single slogan. It is a film about nothing but the void, and the void, for once, has no agenda.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
On the trail of a missing girl, an ex-cop comes across a secretive group attempting to summon a terrifying supernatural entity.
Questions about The Empty Man
Is The Empty Man woke?
No — The Empty Man is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Empty Man have any woke elements?
No. All 10 markers score zero.
How does The Empty Man compare to other 2020 movies?
It ranks #210 of the 227 films from 2020 we've scored; their average is 21. The wokest is One Night in Miami... (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.