In an isolated farm house, Suzanne is on the verge of losing her footing. Relentlessly, she tries to understand what happened to her partner, who mysteriously disappeared. Under the pretext of watching over her, Linda and Nicole do not leave her side, one displaying an affected benevolence, the other, a poorly concealed animosity. Both owner and prisoner, Suzanne wanders, haunted, terrified… In Emptiness (The void), by Onur Karaman, fear tightens its grip, one turn of the screw at a time.
The allusion to the Henry James classic The Turn of the Screw (The turn of the screw) is not innocent. In fact, the film by the Montreal director, screenwriter and producer of Turkish origin is also based on the unreliable perceptions of a heroine who is either prey to authentic supernatural phenomena, or the victim of hallucinations straight out of his imagination. So how can we distinguish reality from fantasy? From this ambiguity arises tension.
“It’s strange, because I’ve been working on this project since 2015, but it was only last week that I really realized why I made this film,” says Onur Karaman.
Across the ocean
“It goes back to the announcement that my grandmother had a degenerative disease related to Alzheimer’s and dementia. I found it so unfair, because my grandmother was someone who helped lots of people all her life; she was at the bedside of many people and accompanied them until the end. And there, knowing she was alone on the other side of the ocean… All we could do was hire a home helper to watch over her, but at the same time, how do we know if this person still takes care of it well, on a daily basis? So, there was all that, and I think that this film is very much my angry reaction to the injustice of my grandmother’s illness,” sums up the filmmaker with emotion.
Hence this heroine obsessed by a fleeting past, and whose universe is confined to a property with increasingly dark, more and more foreign corners…
“I started writing this script with a lot of rage, but one thing led to another and it became like a kind of tender poem; a visual poem. There still remains a lot of darkness…”
This darkness pursues, sometimes literally, in the form of smoke, a Suzanne plunged into complete disarray. Struggling to identify what she is nevertheless desperately seeking, and trying in vain to escape from what she doesn’t really know, Suzanne is also confronted with the cryptic comments of Nicole and Linda. Doubt hovers, anxiety increases…
“I had to make sure I maintained a balance, which was very fragile. Listening to my grandmother’s stories, something that struck me was how, for her, the time line stopped being a line: it became a point where all the eras overlapped. There was no longer any demarcation between past and present: time ceased to exist. So I integrated that into the perception of Suzanne’s character. Because of this, and this is important to mention, the film does not follow a standard narrative structure. It’s like a visual puzzle, and all the pieces are there so viewers can understand what it is. »
During the denouement, the picture becomes clearer, each piece of the puzzle falling into place.
Metaphorical terror
Filmed mostly in black and white, Emptiness exudes an aura of dark despair that has the luck to bewitch.
“The black and white and monochrome touches came from my visits to the Museum of Fine Arts. I thought I could use that in the film, in a symbolic way. »
So black and white represents another form of prison for Suzanne, with a brief moment in color at the end, heartbreaking in its transience…
“People have the impression that it’s easier to shoot in black and white, but it’s the opposite. It’s very complicated. My goal with this decision was to give the film a timeless dimension. »
On the technical side, Emptiness is a tour de force, Onur Karaman having worked with, according to him, a budget of around 150,000 dollars. And again, the film almost never saw the light of day: “At the funding institutions, they suggested that I stick to social dramas rather than trying to make horror. »
Onur Karaman held on.
“It was the most tough of my life. Most filmmakers would not risk making a film with so few resources. We have shots complicated, visual effects… I’m super proud of this film. It represents a lot of intimate things for me, but it’s also a good calling card that proves that I can make horror. »
This attraction to terror is in this case as deep as it is sincere in Onur Karaman. Ultimately, this has more to do with “tenor” than “scariness”.
“In my film, basically, I’m about aging, and it’s a subject that most people don’t want to hear about. And that’s why I love horror: because it’s a genre that allows you to approach all kinds of difficult subjects through metaphor. »