Director: Rob Savage
Writers: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, and Mark Heyman
Stars: Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, Vivien Lyra Blair
Synopsis: High school student Sadie Harper and her younger sister, Sawyer, are still reeling from the recent death of their mother. They’re not getting much support from their father, Will, a therapist who’s dealing with his own intense pain. When a desperate patient unexpectedly shows up at their house seeking help, he leaves behind a terrifying supernatural entity that preys on families and feeds on the suffering of its victims.
Everything that master horror author Stephen King, who has created classic tales like Carrie, The Shining, and Pet Sematary, doesn’t turn into gold. And although I really respect his constant drive for creating horror stories decade through decade, there have been plenty of lackluster ones. An example is the short story included in King’s 1978 ‘Night Shift’ collection, The Boogeyman. The acclaimed genre auteur’s name isn’t enough to excite me to watch a feature anymore. You need a talented director who has their own voice and can translate that story from the pages onto the big screen successfully. I believed Rob Savage was once that director that could bring enough horrific pizzazz onto a project and make it its own, even if it’s an adaptation, because of his hit debut Host, which startled many horror cinema lovers during the pandemic. Unfortunately, the British filmmaker makes a highly disappointing feature that dwells in every genre trope imaginable, making it a tough watch due to its dullness.
The Boogeyman centers around a sixteen-year-old girl named Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and her ten-year-old sister, Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair), who are struggling to connect and move forward in the wake of their mother’s brutal passing. Their therapist father, Will Harper (Chris Messina), seems to be so isolated emotionally that he’s distant, not only to his patients, but also to his two daughters. After introducing these characters, a cheesy high school bully scene follows, inducing plenty of eye rolls. The dialogue feels that it was generated by an A.I. of some sort. Nonetheless, Sophie heads home after an altercation with the mean girl in the locker near her. And that’s when a strange man, Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian), knocks on Will’s door, asking him to understand his pain and the belief of a dark entity haunting his daily life. Haunted by the entity that personifies his grief and depression, Lester kills himself at the Harper house, paving the way for the creature to lurk in their hallways.
Putting all of the cliches aside, the narrative is intriguing enough for the audience to put their attention into. Everything might not be sharply put together until this point, yet you go with it to see where it might lead. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go anywhere interesting. The biggest problem of them all is that The Boogeyman is, in all of its aspects , average and harmless – never having a unique identity of its own and choosing to go down a route that doesn’t deliver an emotional payoff. I heavily disliked Rob Savage’s previous feature, Dashcam. But, I’d prefer him to go broader into shlock-like horror cinema – with buckets of blood being spilled, people throwing up, foul-mouthed characters, and some experimental direction – because, in those films, he can express himself better as a filmmaker. Unfortunately, in these studio films, Savage is restrained from demonstrating his talents because he has to curate a film that targets the Stranger Things audience.
With The Boogeyman, Savage presents us with one of the most bland and uninspired horror narratives this year. Not even the titular creature has a great design; it feels like a copy of a Demogordon, albeit without the flower-like head and with a more hound look to it. Some of the same problems I had with Scott Derickson’s The Black Phone, targeted to the same audience as this one, are repeated here. Both films frustratingly rely on the precise Stephen King horror tropes to the point where they are rendered indistinguishable and hollow. This is an issue because you can’t shake the feeling that we have seen this type of film before, and has been done better by filmmakers that make twists to the narrative or, at the very least, develop a unique directorial language to tell a commonly seen tale about the effects of grief and trauma, which seems to be the central theme in most recent big studio horror pictures.
There are a few instances in which you see Rob Savage trying to breathe life into the film with some flashy lighting and using shadowplay. In those moments, you notice Savage’s gift of providing good scares. Yet, those moments are forgotten by the time the end credits arrive. The performances carry the emotional weight and heart that The Boogeyman has on its sleeve, particularly the leading girl Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, and the always fascinating (but ultimately wasted) Marin Ireland. Both Thatcher and Messina portray the drowning sensation grief puts onto you in a way that makes you believe in their pain. The former has several moments where she can express her desire for her mother to return with her facial expressions rather than by dialogue. Ireland has the most superficial role in the film compared with the two aforementioned actors. But she’s so engaging to watch, no matter the role, that you are excited to see her, even if it is for less than five minutes.
Nevertheless, the cast can only go as far as the screenplay, rapidly filling in the tension and risk-less blanks. It sometimes feels as if Savage and his team of screenwriters barely want to create an inventive story. Every narrative beat has been seen before multiple times; cliches and tropes of teen-oriented horror pictures are at the forefront – the unnecessarily mean bully (whom Sadie slaps at one point in the movie and people cheered for some reason), the “you never listen to me” line and a literal fiery climax. You can see everything coming from a mile away. And since the direction is uninspired, the viewer doesn’t want to engage with what’s happening. Even when the actors have shared the respective ways they prepared for the role and to connect with them more, Thatcher created a playlist that resembles the feeling of a grief-hardened heart, every cinematic element in The Boogeyman seemed that there wasn’t any care or thought put into it. I have wanted to cheer Rob Savage’s career on since he made one of the very first highly effective pandemic horror films with Host. But, his latter works have made me hopeless to see him in top form again.
