Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Rob Savage
Starring: Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, Vivien Lyra Blair, Marin Ireland, Madison Hu, David Dastmalchian, LisaGay Hamilton
In my early twenties I lived in a dingy bedsit with a patch of damp on
the ceiling. Over the course of my tenancy that patch grew and festered,
but because I'm Irish and thus live in perpetual fear of inconvenience,
either to myself or others, I never bothered alerting my landlord to the
problem. Then one day as a friend and I were sat on the couch playing
FIFA on Playstation the ceiling collapsed on top of us. The moral of the
story is, if you don’t confront your problems, you'll end up with your
ceiling in your lap.
In director Rob Savage's adaptation of Stephen King's
1973 short story The Boogeyman (Penned by
A Quiet Place
writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, along with
Mark Heyman), a damp patch on the ceiling acts as a visual
metaphor for issues left unresolved. The patch is in the bedroom of
teenager Sadie Harper (Sophie Thatcher, best known to TV viewers
for her role in Yellowjackets and to us wafflers for her
part in sci-fi drama
Prospect), who would probably tell her father about it in normal circumstances.
But these aren't normal circumstances for the Harper family. Sadie's
mother passed away a month ago and her father Will (Chris Messina) has immersed himself in his job as a therapist rather than
confronting his grief or helping Sadie and her kid sister Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) to process theirs. In this way The Boogeyman appears
heavily influenced by Nanni Moretti's masterful examination of grief,
The Son's Room, with Messina even sporting the same beard and pullover combo as the
troubled therapist Moretti played in his film.
Moretti didn't have to deal with a monster that preys on those in
mourning however. That's the situation the Harpers find themselves in
when Will reluctantly agrees to humour an unstable man named Lester
Billings (David Dastmalchian) who turns up at his office
unannounced. Billings claims that after the accidental death of one of
his children, a monster appeared and terrorised his two surviving kids
before taking their lives. While Will is calling the cops, Billings
hangs himself in a closet, adding to Sadie's trauma when she discovers
his limp corpse.
As Will tries to brush the incident under the carpet, sending Sadie to
a fellow therapist (LisaGay Hamilton) rather than speaking with
his daughter himself, Sawyer begins to have visions of a monster in her
closet and lurking in the shadows of her home. Skeptical at first, Sadie
chooses to believe her sister and begins an investigation into Billings'
background.
King's short story was a brief twist-in-the-tale shocker. Savage and
his writers have taken the story's basic premise, that of a therapist
being confronted by a deranged man with wild claims, and expanded it
into a feature that adds elements of M. Night Shyamalan to some classic
horror tropes. It's not particularly original, but it understands the
tropes of the genre and uses them to good effect. There's always
something both creepy and melancholy about horror movies where a young
protagonist has to take things into their own hands due to a useless
parent, an idea that's worked in everything from
Invaders from Mars to
A Nightmare on Elm Street. A good horror protagonist is one who begins in a place of
vulnerability before summoning up the courage to take on whatever
particular threat they face. That's what we get here with Sadie, who is
in a terrible state when we meet her, bullied by the sort of sociopathic
teens that populate King's work and neglected by her dad. In confronting
this particular boogeyman she finds the strength to face her fears.
Thatcher brilliantly conveys this arc, making the transition in a manner
that comes off as a natural progression rather than any sudden turn from
cowering teen to badass monster hunter, and the writers are wise enough
to remind us that she's often out of her depth.
Savage calls on some classic childhood fears – the monster under the
bed or in the closet, the thing that lurks in the shadows – and builds
effective set-pieces around them. There's some clever use of
unconventional light sources to riff on classic movie sequences like a
video game controller aping the flash bulb of Jimmy Stewart's camera in
Rear Window
or a glowing ball that playfully recalls George C. Scott being
terrorised in The Changeling. Savage cleverly keeps his titular monster in the shadows long enough
for its lore to build up to the point where its physical manifestation
is a mute point.
As someone who failed to understand the cheerleading for Savage's
widely acclaimed debut
Host
(though I admired its resourcefulness) and found his followup,
Dashcam, to be one of the most annoying movies I've ever had the misfortune to
sit through, I have to confess I didn't have high hopes for
The Boogeyman. What a pleasant surprise to find Savage proves a more natural fit in
traditional horror filmmaking than the found footage sub-genre he came
up in. At this point it's practically a miracle when a Stephen King
adaptation turns out to be watchable, and by my calculations this is the
best since 1995's Dolores Claiborne. If you are a fan of Host, look out for a cameo that appears to tie
The Boogeyman into its cinematic universe.
