The Void follows a police officer who finds a bloodied man stumbling out of the woods. The officer, Daniel, takes the man to a local hospital that is mostly shut down due to a recent fire. There are two nurses, an intern, a doctor, a patient, a very pregnant young lady, her grandfather and a state trooper at the scene when Daniel and his catch arrive. Soon, one of the nurses is cutting her own face off with scissors and the whole place is surrounded by men wearing white hoods with black triangles on them. Things go off the rails pretty quickly after some exposition scenes letting us know Daniel is married to one of the nurses. Two guys who started the movie gunning down a woman and setting her on fire show up to make the mix even more explosive. The cast quickly shrinks and soon, an ultimate evil is set to be freed in the hospital on this night.
This movie owes a lot to John Carpenter's The Thing. Not just the practical effects for the hideous creatures but the overall isolation of the cast from the rest of the world. The cult members surrounding the hospital aren't there to break in, they are there to keep the cast from leaving. So, they are stuck as all sorts of horror unfolds. There is some gore here and some callbacks to Hellraiser as well. Aaron Poole, the poor man's Aaron Paul, stars as Daniel and does a good enough job being the believably flawed horror hero. The two murderers who burst in to the hospital to make things worse are compelling just through their scant backstory. You want to know more about these guys as they start playing a more central role. The ending gets a little on the cheesy side with a monologue-prone villain. It all reminds me a little of something I would have written when I was a teenager, a little too in love with its own ideas. My friend I watched it with said it kept him surprised, which is one of the better things one can say about a horror movie.
I liked this one and fans of Lovecraftian or Clive Barker-style monsters should give it a watch.
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