The Void (2016)
Directed by Jeremy Gillespie
No — The Void is not woke, scoring 7 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Void arrives as a Canadian Lovecraftian pastiche, a film that trades in flayed faces, tentacled mutations, and a cosmology of ancient entities indifferent to human suffering.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is a small ensemble of mostly white Canadian character actors with one Asian-Canadian performer (Ellen Wong) present without any narrative comment or representational framing.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
Female characters exist as a nurse, a pregnant patient, and a victim; the film has no feminist thesis or commentary on gender.
The film engages no racial themes or commentary whatsoever.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No economic critique or anti-capitalist messaging; the horror is cosmic and bodily, not systemic.
The film is a body-horror exercise in mutation and flaying, the thematic inverse of body positivity.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are depicted.
The film is a fictional Lovecraftian pastiche with no historical subject matter to revise.
The film offers no moral instruction or social messaging; it is a visceral creature feature with deliberately ambiguous mythology.
Why it received this score
The Void arrives as a Canadian Lovecraftian pastiche, a film that trades in flayed faces, tentacled mutations, and a cosmology of ancient entities indifferent to human suffering. Directed by Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski, it follows a deputy sheriff who stumbles into a rural hospital where patients and staff are transforming into something inhuman. The plot is a thin scaffold for a series of increasingly grotesque practical effects, a deliberate throwback to the creature features of the 1980s. There is no thesis here, no argument about the way we live now. The film is content to be a nightmare, and it succeeds on those terms.
The cast is a small ensemble of mostly white Canadian character actors, with Ellen Wong appearing as a nurse's aide. Her presence is unremarked upon, a fact that earns the film a modest nod for representation casting, though the film itself offers no commentary on race, gender, or sexuality. There are no LGBTQ+ characters, no feminist undertones, no engagement with racial consciousness or climate anxiety. The film has no interest in capitalism, except insofar as its characters are trapped in a crumbling hospital. Body positivity is not on the agenda; this is a film about bodies being violated, mutated, and destroyed. Neurodivergence, revisionist history, and lecture energy are similarly absent. The Void does not lecture. It simply presents a world where the void stares back.
This could be called a limitation, but that would miss the point. The Void is a genre exercise, and its lack of social messaging is not a failure of imagination but a commitment to a particular kind of horror. It is a film for those who appreciate the tactile horror of latex and fake blood, who find comfort in the familiar rhythms of a siege narrative. It will not change your politics. It will not challenge your assumptions. It will simply unsettle you for ninety minutes, and then it will end. In a cultural moment saturated with instruction, there is something almost refreshing about a film that wants only to show you a monster.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
In the middle of a routine patrol, officer Daniel Carter happens upon a blood-soaked figure limping down a deserted stretch of road. He rushes the young man to a nearby rural hospital staffed by a skeleton crew, only to discover that patients and personnel are transforming into something inhuman. As the horror intensifies, Carter leads the other survivors on a hellish voyage into the subterranean depths of the hospital in a desperate bid to end the nightmare before it's too late.
Questions about The Void
Is The Void woke?
No — The Void is not woke, scoring 7 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Void have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 12.
How does The Void compare to other 2016 movies?
It ranks #190 of the 285 films from 2016 we've scored; their average is 16. The wokest is 13th (92).
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.