If you guys had told me it was the cosmic horror version of Universal Soldier Day of Reckoning I'd likely have got to it earlier. Very weird because it quite simple isn't the kind of thing that is usually done in a studio budget and makes the best out of its glossy surfaces. Some strong Kiyoshi Kurosawa vibes, particularly Pulse. The ending is kinda obvious because you can't have your lead character surname be "the shadow" when your movie is called The Empty Man, but even that fits giving how much it is really about imagination and fictions that shape it. The dread is effective horrible throughtout from the prologue to the final scenes, even if those are the least interesting because its imagination doesn't have much out after it reaches its own expired destination. It is a Hollywood movie after all, so it has to remain functional, that is an expected trade off. Prior really directed this so every bit of the investigation is exciting and dreadful and Dale remain one of the great genre anti stars, just a guy who really good at suggesting the drudgery involved in whatever plotting he is thrown at, the ideal action actor, just always in the process of doing stuff which is perfect for a movie like this. It also made me think a lot about Smiley Face Killers, another very good piece of paranoid fiction dumped late last year. One last point, I think this is the first mainstream narrative feature to turn the bloat that serialized TV has bring into Hollywood movies into an actual bonus.