It's a quiet rural town in the forests of Nowhere USA when an on-duty cop stumbles on a drugged up man wandering through the woods. He's taken to the closest hospital, the kind that is quite literally about to be rebuilt and has a staff of 3 during the night shift. There's a pregnant woman, her grandfather, a student nurse who's afraid of needles, and a doctor that would probably rather be at home in bed.
From nowhere, the hospital is surrounded by these shrouded people wearing white robes. It's indicative of the KKK save for a prominent black triangle on the face and the long knives they carry as weapons. They do not attack, they simply stand guard outside allowing no one to enter or leave.
Villain #1: Established.
In the hospital, the rag-tag team of misfits struggle to find out who these people are and what their ties are to this mysterious man found in the woods and two men who have tracked him to the hospital in efforts to kill him. Our cop named Carter hears a noise from one of the hospital rooms during this ruckus and finds a woman peeling off her face and murdering a patient with some surgical scissors. After being shot, she transforms into a monster straight out of John Carpenter's The Thing, complete with whip-like tentacles and large bloody masses of deformed flesh. We learn through unexplained means that everyone in the hospital has the potential to transform into one of these monsters due to the fact that the screenplay said it.
Villain #2: Got it.
In efforts to find the source of this blatant evil, Carter and the gang retreat into the basement from where they received a mysterious phone call from the hospital's morgue. It quickly turns into a descent into Hell, where Villain #3 and #4 are introduced just to add to the chaos.
If you've seen the poster than you have no idea what this film is about. If you've watched the trailer than you will be just as equally in the dark. The intrigue with a movie like The Void is that despite all it's bizarre twists and turns, it still keeps you guessing. That's not to say it isn't riddled with the cliches you might find in a horror movie set in a hospital (the inexperienced nurse has to attempt a c-section while the windows are being attacked by zombies, the telephones suddenly stop working, the sheets covering dead bodies are spring-loaded for a jump scare, etc). I will say for certain that despite the wildly bizarre story that eventually unfolds before us, this isn't something I would have necessarily guessed as a climax to a movie that begins with some robed clansmen standing still in the woods.
The tone of the film is remarkably grim and keeps you in a constant state of shock. Each new doorway adds to the tension, and I was genuinely intrigued by the setting of this movie, even though 'creepy abandoned hospitals' might also be added to that cliche list previously mentioned. The characters are carbon copies of all those people you yell at in movies who do stupid things that are so blatantly wrong (I'm going to go get some supplies in that dark stock room alone, I'll be right back).
If you need a movie filled with gratuitous violence and some clever creature/makeup effects, then by all means this is NOT the movie to go see. In 1982 John Carpenter made a movie about a collection of people in an isolated location being hunted by some malevolent, slimy evil. That's a great movie that at the time shocked audiences and has practical effects that still hold up today. It's clearly the main inspiration for this flick. It's called "The Thing." "The Void" is barely a shadow of that film.
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