ave (Hewlett) and Andrew (Miller) are two Toronto losers/slackers who have known each other since they were kids. They live with their pet turtle Stan (Himself) in the house that Andrew's parents left him, which squats on a toxic-looking vacant lot stuck between two rumbling overpasses. Dave is the severely agoraphobic Andrew's one support and tether to the outside world ... until Dave announces he's moving in with his girlfriend. This sends Andrew into apoplexies, as it's garbage day, and Andrew must face the terror of hauling the trash across the Mordor-like lot to the curb.
Dave goes to his workplace, an environment that combines the worst of Kafka with Mike Judge's Office Space, faces horrible co-workers and is informed that his boss wants to see him. Certain he's up for a promotion, he gets some very unexpected news instead. Distressed, he goes to his girlfriend's apartment and gets yet more unexpected news that seems to put into rather dreadful context what his boss had told him earlier.
Meanwhile, Andrew, still in his pajamas, is having more trouble taking out the garbage than he bargained for. Waaaay more trouble. He gets some help from a kind stranger, but this help, like the trip to the curb, becomes much more than he bargained for.
Dave comes home. Things, impossibly, get worse for the pasty pair. The authorities are called. The house is put under siege. Stan the Turtle is threatened by tear gas. Dave and Andrew shout for those harassing them to "Go away!"
A blinding light pours through the windows and doors. Outside their house, extending forever, is a vast expanse of white nothing. The world really has gone away ...
A terrifying hysterical void
Vincenzo Natali nabbed the attention of the SF world with his low-budget high-tech horror flick Cube. Nothing, which stars two cast members of Cube (Stargate Atlantis' Hewlett played the architect prisoner, and Miller played the autistic savant prisoner) is a thematic sequel to Cube: A small cast of characters is yanked from the world and shoved into an abstract void. The delirious joy of Nothing is seeing how these two profound losers, the kind of guys who are dim memories for most people as they flip through dusty yearbooks, come to terms with being pulled out of a world for which they don't have a shred of love. In a supreme tantrum of frustration, all existence is made a tablua rasa. This allows Nothing to be not only a character-defined movie; it's a movie in which the two characters define their whole world. If it weren't for the richness of the characterization of these two losers, Nothing would have ... well ... nothing going for it. But like a well-written play, Nothing is defined completely by the emotional realities of its two leads.
In a world of nothing, there's nowhere for the film's lovable dodgeball victims to focus their new set of frustrations, except each other and themselves. The pathologies of David and Andrew (given hysterical expression by frantically animated insert shots) fill Nothing with an existential angst that's funny because it feels so brutally familiar and true; think Waiting for Godot by way of Napoleon Dynamite.
Nothing, thankfully, knows when to quit. The movie is basically three short movies (the lead-up to the world going away; the coming to grips with the nothing; then a final meltdown), and each is paced perfectly. Unlike most comedies, Nothing doesn't wear out its welcome.
