{"id":40591,"date":"2023-08-08T01:42:35","date_gmt":"2023-08-08T05:42:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=40591"},"modified":"2023-08-08T01:42:35","modified_gmt":"2023-08-08T05:42:35","slug":"emptiness-2023-fantasia-film-festival-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/08\/emptiness-2023-fantasia-film-festival-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Emptiness (2023) [Fantasia Film Festival 2023]\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A woman whose husband has disappeared is stuck in a house with two other women, one helpful, the other not so much.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Written and directed by Onur Karaman, Emptiness is a total story miss for this viewer. Meaning it\u2019s bland, it\u2019s boring, it takes forever to get anywhere, and the characters are not people that are easy to care about. From that it\u2019s hard to tell if the film is well directed as the writing is severely lacking. Of course, some folks will love this style, but for those looking for a story that will grab their attention and never let it go, this is not it. Not it at all. Which unfortunate as there seems to be a few good ideas here and there in the movie, some of the themes could have led to something really interesting when explored in a different way. As it is though, the story of a disappearance, a bit of gaslighting, some more gaslighting, and mean people being mean is not something that is an enjoyable watch. Or an entertaining one. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The cast here comes off bland, but that may have more to do with the story and characters are written and directed than from their actual performances. The cast seems to get into character decently for what they are given here, making it really easy to just dislike a few of them and just feel \u201cmeh\u201d about the others. The film has the characters limited to a few locations, within one house mostly, and with limited interactions with external components. There are six people total in the cast and a day after watching the film, it\u2019s difficult to remember who is who in terms of roles and performances. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Something that doesn\u2019t help the cast is the darkness of the film. Yes, it makes a point. No, it doesn\u2019t help. The look of the film is interesting at first, but some of the scenes are too dark for their own good. Which most likely was a style choice and something that was felt to be needed for the story. The cinematography by Thomas McNamara is well done in how this needed to be to fit the style. It\u2019s, however, not really helping the story for this viewer. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Emptiness is one of those films that was going to be a dark subject matter no matter what which then doubled down on it with the images and the style the film was shot in. The performances are not super interesting, but this may be due to the writing and directing. When something is missing at the base of a film, in the story, there whole film has a hard time picking back up and saving itself from itself. Of course, the film has it audience that will adore it, but to be a part of that group of viewers, one needs to have a high tolerance to watching people getting the gaslighting of a lifetime, verbal abuse, and general darkness to their lives. There is not much in terms of light, literally or figuratively.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This year the Fantasia International Film Festival runs in Montreal from July 20th\u00a0to August 9th.<\/span><\/i><\/b>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A woman whose husband has disappeared is stuck in a house with two other women, one helpful, the other not so much.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1284,12],"tags":[302,1749,477,501],"class_list":["post-40591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-festivalsevents","category-movie-reviews","tag-drama","tag-fantasia","tag-horror","tag-indie-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40592,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40591\/revisions\/40592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}