In this bare-bones horror film, a young woman joins a cult and eventually defies its patriarch.
In horror, the burden of taking down the patriarchy — whether symbolized by a group of violent men or just one foreboding male monster — often rests on the humble shoulders of a young woman. “Hell Is Empty,” a film by the director Jo Shaffer about a girl who haplessly joins and eventually dismantles a remote cult, follows this tradition. Unfortunately, its heroine is just one in a series of underwritten characters.
The film centers on Lydia (Spencer Peppet), a redheaded runaway who is found, unconscious, in the wilderness and brought to the cult compound by its leader, Ed (Travis Mitchell). Lydia joins four other women in a rickety island shack overseen by Ed, who the followers also call Artist, for his prolific paintings of biblical scenes and the apocalypse. One noticeably pregnant follower, Saratoga (Nia Farrell), claims to be a virgin expecting the son of God. Lydia sees no red flags here and happily stays, eventually fighting back against Ed — and two of the other women — only after things get murderous.
Forget about hell, the emptiness these filmmakers must address lies primarily in their predominantly female cast of characters. We don’t know where Lydia comes from, nor why it would be a worse place to return to than a cult led by a rapist. There is no plot justification for Lydia’s bizarre acceptance, just as there is little background for anything else in the script, co-written by Shaffer and Adam DeSantes.
One of Ed’s followers, Murphy (Aya), stumbles from scene to scene, hunched over and completely mute. An oblivious crony to Ed, she presents a particularly galling caricature of developmental disability, one that is painful to watch in 2022. The movie’s press notes explain that Murphy grew up alone and feral in the forest, but there is no mention of this in the film itself — an apt example of how “Hell Is Empty” renders all its players with aggravating shallowness.
Hell Is Empty
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
