Tiptoe through the Tulpas

The Empty Man (2020) is an odd kind of horror movie - actually 3 or 4 kinds.

It starts out in Bhutan with two young American couples hiking. They go up a mountain and over a dangerous looking rope bridge. They're about to head down when one of them hears a sound. He goes to investigate and falls into a crevice. When the other guy climbs down, he finds him sitting crosslegged and silent in front of a six-armed, dome-skulled, twenty-fingered skeleton. He is completely unresponsive. They get him back to a hut, but can't hike him out, besides, there's a storm. The next morning, one of the women sees a figure in the fog, and the previously comatose guy is gone. Then, his girlfriend goes nuts, kills the other couple, then herself, and plunges off a cliff.

Cool! Tibetan demonic possession movie! Roll opening credits.

The next scene James Badge Dale is grieving over something, and Sasha Frolova, daughter of a family friend comes to check in. She's got a bit of teenaged nihilism going on, but seems pretty together. But her mother, Marin Ireland, calls the next day to say that she has disappeared. Not only that but she has scrawled, "The Empty Man made me do it" in the bathroom in blood.

Dale starts to investigate. One of Frolova's highschool friends, Samantha Logan, tells him about a recent night her, Frolova, and a bunch of kids where hanging out at a bridge and talking about the Empty Man - if you blow across a bottle at a bridge and think about the Empty Man, he'll come and kill you in three days.

OK, it's an urban legend movie. Not as cool as a Tibetan demon, but we'll go along. 

Checking out the bridge, Dale finds the teens hanged underneath - but not Frolova. Dale starts to put certain (obvious)clues together, and decides that these disappearances and deaths are related to something called the Pontifex Institute. He does some quick wikipedia research and finds out that it is a kind of nihilistic, solipsistic self-help cult, who believe in "tulpas", a Tibetan term for "mind bodies", embodied thought forms. He investigates the cult and...

Oh, yeah, now we're in a cult movie. Anyway, I won't give much more away - but there's a few more twists and at least a hint at another movie, about memory and identity. Also, SPOILER - the crazy skeleton never really pays off.

I actually kind of enjoyed this mish-mash. Maybe it was partly the pleasure of the Bhutan setting. But the rest of it seemed to have a good look. This is director David Prior's first features - he had previously made a bunch of "Making of.." shorts. It was taken from a comic book, which might help explain the mix of concepts and tropes.

In conclusion, I'd like to mention the sound that attracted the hiker to the crevice was made with a sort of bone flute, played like blowing over the mouth of a bottle. This reminded me of the Aztec Death Whistle, but it sounds nothing like that. Never mind.