How to hide a subreport?

I am not able to hide one of my subreports even though there are 0 records returned!  This should be simple, but here is what I have tried that is not working:

Adding a "No Rows" message for the tablix.  THis just shows a blank box representing the matrix.  Although there is no text, this box takes up one whole page.

setting the tablix visibility to: "=isnothing(Fields!.record_id.value)"

setting the sproc filter to: "<> NULL"

But none of these hide the tablix or subreport.  (I configured all of the above in the subreport and not the parent report).  How can I do this?

Ryan D