Review: THE BOOGEYMAN

A prologue that declares a broken violence limit gives way to a story about a family struggling with grief after the loss of the mother in an accident. Dad's a therapist working from home, trying to ease his way through to peace through slog. His teenage daughter Sadie is finding it hard to tell between confusion and anger. Her under ten sister Sawyer seems the best able to get through the times. Then a man without an appointment walks in for a therapy session, talks of bizarre dangers which have led to his children's death. Some thing disastrously bad happens and there is a force unleashed in the house of dark malevolence in every shadow. Remember little Sawyer? She's the one who sees it and it's soon apparent that the vulnerable and receptive are victims in waiting. Dark times.

At first sight of the trailer for this one and then knowing it was a Stephen King adaptation, I put it into a candidate in an indifferent field as a candidate for a cinema outing. Then I learned it was directed by Rob Savage. Who? Well, he wrote and directed one of the most successful debuts any young filmmaker could have and got the kind of attention usually confined to daydreams. His film Host debuted on the horror streamer Shudder in 2020. It was a supernatural tale told through a zoom meeting during lockdown. It wasn't just an effective piece, it was carved out of the times themselves and caught a mass audience without a syllable of its production team's reputation. Everyone who was already sick of screen life as the only life, bumping elbows instead of hugging, felt seen and heard. His next, Dashcam,  took the found footage concept further by being a kind of YouTube real time horror and, though not as well seen, found an audience that could make it past the intentional toxicity of his protagonist (a vile and shitmouthed influencer). Rob Savage has the audience aim of a sniper. So, what would he do with a mainstream budget and a Stephen King source?

Mostly, he does his job. So, while there are a few too many jump scares, I'll admit they are well earned and suspenseful (as opposed to almost any in the Conjureverse). There is the social pecking order at the school but there's a depth given to its players that King adaptations seldom allow. There is a monster which does look like the manifestation of a child's drawing but its revelation is sparing until the necessary reveal in the third act. This is the work of someone whose success depended on being unconventional but astute working within a long formulated genre (Stephen Kingism) willing to prod the boundaries. Those boundaries are tough and push back but there's a clear pint or two of fight in the execution here.

Mostly, and this is the case so far with Savage, it's performance that draws us in. Sophie Thatcher brings us a teenage Sadie who is failing to understand where she is in relation to the suddenness of her mother's departure. The few moments of warmth we see her take are the result of work that feels observational and realistic. As she will be the main agent between the reality of fantasy of her little sister's terror and the investigation into how to define and perhaps defeat the monster, we need her rock solid. The beauty of the performance is that this is seriously uncertain and the raising of the stakes is palpable.

So, The Boogeyman resembles the more conventional mainstream horror of Smile or Evil Dead Rise rather than the riskier and richer Bodies Bodies Bodies or Barbarian but it earns points by doing that conventional job with more finesse than it needs to. While I might not rate it among the highest of films, generic or not, this year (and boy does it already have stiff competition) I'll recall it as a pleasing horror outing that pushed, if only slightly, at the edges of its job description. I can easily say much worse of most of what I see in the genre.