Nothing Movie Review

What do you have when everything is gone? Well, nothing of course. Nothing explores nothing with hysterical results. And nothing could be funnier. Er, couldn't be.

Canadian Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Cypher) brings his perverse sense of humor and advanced ability at working with green screens to this quirky flick, a balls-out comedy with an absurd high concept: Two lovable losers (David Hewlett and Andrew Miller), through no fault of their own, find themselves about to be beseiged by IRS agents and the police (for crimes they didn't commit). In a supreme act of silliness, they wish for their troubles to stop. And so they do. Literally. Everything outside their rundown apartment vanishes. Everything! Even the ground and sky disappear, replaced by an endless sea of white in which their home strangely perches.

Naturally this turn of events causes the boys some concern. Are they dead? Crazy? Worse? Before long, it becomes apparent that the nothing is a land which can be explored (it's springy!), and that the guys have somehow developed the power to wish things away -- though not the power to create anything. They can even wish away memories and emotions: They can't create food, so they wish away their hunger instead.

With nothing external to react to, what drives the film forward is the boys' relationship with each other, which becomes increasingly strained due to the lack of stimuli. You'll figure out where this ends up if you're a fan of logic puzzles, but I won't spoil the ending here. Instead, I'll focus on Natali's remarkable ability to turn nothing into a fun and rewarding experience, a fine little indie that's unlike many films I've ever seen. Hewlett and Miller are no slouches in the acting department, and you root for both of them to find away out of the nothing. Good luck with that.

Natali doesn't dwell on particulars (If there's light, where is the sun? Where does the electricity come from?), and that's probably for the best. This is a comedy, not a treatise on cosmology and planetary physics.

I didn't think the special effects could possibly be any good, but Natali again surprises with an amazing ability to make the nothing-world seem totally real. He's obviously learned a thing or two from low-budget effects flicks like Cube, and he may be the best green screen auteur working today.

Highly recommended -- it's really something different.