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The original was posted on /r/horror by /u/BrighterColours on 2025-07-25 17:42:49+00:00.
Spoilers, do not read if you haven't seen the film!!
I saw a clip from the start of this film on Instagram out of nowhere and ended up watching it today. I'd never heard of it.
There's a few threads around on it, but the most recent one is from a year ago. I've read through them all and an fascinated by the range of responses to the film, from loving the first 20 mins and hating the rest of the film to viewing it as one of the best cosmic horror films of the last decade or longer.
I fall into the latter camp. I thought it was brilliant. Sure, a little poorly paced in the middle, definitely has a lot thrown into the mix, and depending on your interpretation there's a number of logical inconsistencies - I get why people might not like it, but I loved it. I really liked James, some of the humor ('naw, fuck that!') was so on point, the spooky scenes were often super freaky, it wasn't gratuitously gory, it took it's time telling it's story, some of the cinematography was great (the scene where one of the girls is looking at the moon from either eye with her finger up, and the shot flits between moon and no moon was so good!).
I've only watched it once, and I need to watch it again (and more closely) to work out once and for all how I interpret it, but I wanted to share some thoughts for possible discussion while it's fresh in my mind.
So the big debate seems to be, is James actually a tulpa or not? I'm leaning towards not. Here's my reasoning. I think what actually happened was Amanda saw an opportunity in a very broken neighbour to replace the current vessel through psychological manipulation (a firm favourite of cults), by creating a situation where James would become involved (her disappearance) along with a set of carefully placed breadcrumbs (the items in her room, including randomly writing the word 'tulpa' on the paper in her room, along with the Pontifex Institute references). It's much more reasonable (to me), that someone who feels they have little left in their life and has had their reality torn away (death of wife and son) would be much more vulnerable to further destruction of that reality. Amanda knows this, and plants seeds like telling James about thoughts being transmitted from elsewhere when we first see them speak.
In most cases, I think summoning the empty man as the kids who die do just results in death if the entity can't enter them or if you don't worship it. Ergo, Paul got possessed after three days while the others all just died. Admittedly I'm not sure where the whispering fits in, I need to rewatch for that. Was the girl who blew the pipe in the cabin the one who later killed everyone and then herself? I don't remember.
Anyway, Amanda is clearly balls deep in this cult, so to give life to her experiment she literally sacrifices her friends by getting them to summon the entity. She doesn't die because she's already in the cult. But people are dying at its hand, that's undeniable for James and makes the concept even more real. I suspect he was allowed to roam the institute until he saw the group trying to summon something (convenient they immediately found him there), and convenient that the leader mentioned having met him before as well as expanding on the idea of undoing meaning and underlying truth. Then, conveniently, he was thrown out a door where another cult member was waiting to direct him to the camp. I think all of this was part of the experiment. Later, the clippings of different people's lives - not hard to pull together. Lots of people live in San Francisco, go to a certain high school, die in car crashes. And throughout all of it, the entity is beginning to work it's magic across the three days. It does exactly what Amanda said it would do, you hear it, see it, and then it comes for you. The whole three days is a group effort to break James and prepare him for possession using that age old cult tactic of manipulation. Right down to him ending up back in the hospital where Amanda is waiting for him. The requisite psychological breakage is transmitted through all the lengths of the cult to James.
The final scenes where Amanda's mother doesn't remember him, and he relives various memories - that to me is the influence of the entity right before it possesses him. The final break with reality as he knows it in order to accept his new reality - that of an empty vessel. I think that's why Amanda smiles, because she can see he's finally believing the underlying 'truth' they've fed him, and manifesting it in the form of believing Nora doesn't know him, in the form of not observing an entity being summoned but being the entity that was summoned (the scene with two James, representing the literal shift in perception of reality from one to the other).
And like all the others, he doesn't stand a chance against an entity as old and angry as this one. Of course he succumbs.
For me, this leaves very little in the way of plot holes - but I do need to do a rewatch. I really loved this film.
Thoughts?