The Boogeyman - Review

In a way it feels reductive to say that the entire direction of the canon of Western horror, especially in film form, can be drawn across the laylines laid down by one Stevie King, but to say otherwise would feel dishonest. It is upon his coke and alcohol fuelled blueprints we build our cities. He is the sewers and the plumbing; he is the cherubic gargoyles and the craggy grotesques. Upon watching Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman it felt almost pointless to learn later that the film is an adaptation of a King short. Even if it wasn’t, it still would be.

It is tempting, even outside of the shadowy monolith of Stephen King (of the lesbians), to talk of the prominent horror filmmakers whose finger prints can be found in The Boogeyman. Wan, Flanagan, Jennifer Kent. But what are we all if not the strange collection of inherited neurosis passed onto us by our parents (and that scene from It)? At some point The Boogeyman must stand on its own feet.

As must Sadie Harper (Sophie Thatcher), who has just lost her mother in an accident. Bullied at school, she finds herself herself with a younger sister who has developed a fear of the dark and a father who, despite being a therapist, refuses to open up to his daughters about his own loss. Compounding the difficulties, a strange man turns up at their house for a therapy session who may (read:will) be bad news.

In both life and movie making, there’s a lot to be said about specialisation. Being too general risks mediocrity. There’s a reason the English language idiom cautioning against being “all things to all people”. Try to please everyone and you risk pleasing no one.

So what is The Boogeyman? Based on director Rob Savage’s previous work it would be not unfair to expect a simple ghost train ride, something he has shown himself to be a dab hand at already. Indeed, there’s a lot of the demarcation of that style of storytelling in here: slow, dark camera crawls, set pieces that build towards jump scares, a monster costume that doesn’t quite hold up when you see too much of it. They’re well crafted too, with a real eye for imagery. Of special note is younger sister Sawyer (Vivian Lyra Blair)’s particular choice of lighting. But the script is too interested in the interiority of the characters to be a pure jump-scare fest, paced 

So is this a family drama? Certainly some of the stronger parts of the movie is the time taken, the patience of both tone and pacing, in creating the aforementioned sense of interiority with the characters. The pace is good too, a mid pace between slow lingering and twitchily overexcited.

When the family members interact it is easy to see a warmth behind the distance created by the tragedy they have suffered. There is, however, the problem that not only does the father figure basically just disappear for a chunk of the movie, but also the fact their interpersonal drama never really propels the narrative. Not many of the big moments in the movie are really about their relationship.

Wait! I hear you say - this is 2023! It must all be an artsy metaphor for trauma. There’s potential febrile ground there: the dramatic, as opposed to narrative, premise is that the film is about a family mourning the loss of their matriarch. Could this haunting be a manifestation of their grief? Thematically, the movie tips on the inert. Those themes are in there, but are not particularly explicitly or implicitly developed. There’s some great earthy bits of production design, and therapy and communication exists as a motif, but those dots aren’t connecting. When Sadie asks her father (Chris Messina) to talk to her, the movie is as reticent as her father to do anything substantial with the invitation.

There’s a lot in there to like, but all of the very decent pieces of the film have not been assembled into the best version of itself. The Boogeyman is, quite simply, a jack of all trades. In its own way it is fascinating for that. Here’s the finger prints of the way Wan and Wannel reshaped popcorn horror in the 00s, Flanagan’s tight writing and dramatic maturity, the “elevated” trauma porn of Hereditary and The Babadook: here’s a film which is the last ten or more years of a horror, and is not a particularly good example of any of it.

If this review seems rather negative, I’ll leave you with this: when I stepped out of the cinema, my friend immediately declared that it was “better than it needed to be.” For what it is worth, I agree, and there’s nothing wrong with that.