THE BOOGEYMAN (2023)

Studio:   20th Century Studios
Director: Rob Savage
Writer:   Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, Mark Heyman
Producer: Shawn Levy, Dan Levine, Dan Cohen
Stars:    Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, Vivien Lyra Blair, Marin Ireland, Madison Hsu, LisaGay Hamilton, David Dastmalchian

Review Score:

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Summary:

One month after their mother's tragic death, two sisters confront a supernatural entity that's drawn to their family's grief.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

One month after his wife Cara's tragic death in a car accident, Dr. William Harper struggles to talk to his teenage daughter Sadie and her younger sister Sawyer about processing their collective grief. Sadie remains fascinated with mementos of her mother, including a keepsake dress, but Will still sidesteps Sadie's attempts to have meaningful conversations about Cara.

Grieving father Lester Billings comes to see Will, who works out of his house as a therapist, despite Lester not being one of Will's patients. Lester explains he thought Will could help him because he believes Will is confronting a similar situation. Lester goes on to claim that his children were killed by a supernatural shadow monster his family took to calling "the boogeyman." Lester adds that the boogeyman comes for children when parents aren't paying attention.

Will excuses himself to quietly call the police due to Lester's presumed mental instability. In the meantime, Sadie returns home from high school. Strange noises draw Sadie to her mother's former painting studio where Sadie finds Lester's dead body hanging in the closet. When her father subsequently speaks to the police, Sadie openly wonders if Lester actually committed suicide because she heard sounds of a struggle before finding him inside the closet.

The boogeyman attacks Sawyer in her bed. Sadie assumes the blood on her sister is merely due to Sawyer's loose tooth. Sadie then ties a string to the closet doorknob in Sawyer's bedroom to remove the tooth. The door spontaneously slams shut on its own, forcibly removing Sawyer's tooth. The tooth is later pulled inside the closet when neither girl is looking.

Sadie and Sawyer have a joint session with family therapist Dr. Weller. Dr. Weller conducts a test to try getting Sawyer over her fear of the dark, but Sawyer ends up wetting her pants following another frightful encounter with the entity. Afterward, Dr. Weller privately admonishes Will for not speaking responsibly with his daughters about their mother's death.

Sadie researches Lester Billings by listening to a recording of his session with her father. Sadie also recreates a sketch one of Lester's daughters drew of the creature. Meanwhile, the monster attacks Sawyer once again.

Sadie asks her best friend Bethany to drive her to the Billings house. There, Sadie meets Lester's distraught wife Rita. Prompted by Sadie saying her sister is supposedly seeing a monster, Rita warns that the boogeyman has now latched on to the Harpers because they are hurt and vulnerable.

Sadie flees from the house when Rita fires a shotgun at a shape in the shadows. Back at home, Sadie disappointedly discovers Will moved all of her mother's belongings to the basement.

Anxious to return to a normal life, Sadie hosts a sleepover for Bethany and three other friends. The five girls briefly smoke a joint left behind by Sadie's mother. Sadie begins coughing uncontrollably before strangely coughing up Sawyer's lost tooth.

One of the curious girls asks to see the closet where Lester Billings died. Sadie has an encounter with the entity when she becomes inexplicably locked inside the closet alone. Upon exiting, Sadie slaps one of the girls as she blames them for what happened. Bethany and the other girls storm out.

The boogeyman attacks Sawyer in the living room. At the hospital afterward, Sadie apologizes to Sawyer while affirming that she now fully believes her sister about the boogeyman.

Rita calls Sadie to her house with a promise that she knows how to get rid of the monster. On her way out of the hospital, Sadie tries telling her father about the creature, but Will dismisses her story because she was high when her closet encounter occurred.

Sadie returns to the Billings house to find it wired with booby traps. Rita suddenly subdues Sadie to use her as unwilling bait for the boogeyman. The monster appears, but it still kills Rita despite her traps.

Sadie escapes the Billings home. Over the phone, Sadie warns her father to get out of their house with Sawyer, but the creature attacks them both.

Sadie races home to rescue Will and Sawyer. Together, the three of them battle the boogeyman in the basement. Based on a previous prompt from Sadie, a lighter flame flickers to the left, indicating the presence of her mother's ghost. Sadie uses the flame to ignite the creature. Cara Harper's belongings also go up in flames as the entire house becomes engulfed in fire.

Sadie, Sawyer, and Will have a joint therapy session with Dr. Weller in the aftermath. Left alone afterward, a voice draws Sadie to a closet door in the doctor's office, but Sadie merely closes it shut.

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Review:

How can I label "The Boogeyman" a "forgettable film," particularly when the movie received raves from a not insignificant number of other critics as well as everyday viewers? It's an easy call, really. It's because I saw "The Boogeyman" twice, and when I watched it for the second time to write this review, I realized my memory had been wiped of almost every detail from my screening just three months prior. That's quite literally the very definition of a "forgettable film."

Admittedly, "The Boogeyman" falls from one of my least favorite branches on the horror tree: the "sibling/guardian protects a young child from an evil entity until skeptical adults finally get with the program" subgenre. I'm sure there's a shorter term for that category. I may have even used one myself in any of the umpteen previous reviews I've written about kids fighting shapes in the shadows while desperately pleading for parents to pay attention. Anyway, this is one of my least favorite horror subgenres because it's one of the most formulaic: troubled child encounters supernatural creature, paranormal activity gradually escalates, late-stage information dump explains everything, dropped-jaw mother/father realizes crazy claims were true all along. Yada yada yawn.

It's saying something that in a bottomless ocean of copycat films featuring these same cookie-cutter characters, Dr. Will Harper takes the cake for the "disbelieving parent" cliche. Will's severe lack of responsible parental skills is made all the more shocking by the fact that he works as a therapist. You'd think a cognitive behavioral specialist would be sensitive to the emotional trauma suffered by his teen daughter Sadie and her younger sister Sawyer following the tragic death of their mother one month ago. Surprise surprise, he isn't. Apparently he can only help others, not his own family, allowing a dark cloud of grief to rain down gloomy thunderstorms on all three perpetual frowns in their dour household.

Trained mental health professional or not, you'd also think that when a mysterious man who claims a monster killed his children suddenly commits suicide in an upstairs closet, Will might have the wherewithal to say, "Gee, maybe the kids shouldn't sleep here tonight?" Well, he doesn't do that either. For some reason, *cough* poor plotting *cough*, Will simply tucks in his girls for the night, as if one of his daughters didn't just stumble upon a dead body in their house only a few hours earlier.

While Sadie deals with the can't-be-unseen sight of a random guy's still-warm corpse, younger sister Sawyer deals with a typical monster in her closet. Of course, it takes a few eerie encounters with this entity, and an exposition-heavy encounter with the dead guy's distraught wife, before big sis Sadie ultimately believes her. The question then becomes, can they, or rather Sadie since Will barely ever interacts with the other girl, get Dad to believe before the family's final faceoff with the grief-feeding fiend?

Director Rob Savage and company put "The Boogeyman" together well enough in terms of conventional story structure, professional cinematography, serviceable acting, etc. That's the problem. With this "play it safe" approach, "The Boogeyman" becomes a small shadow of every identical frightener whose bigger footsteps it follows in. Slow and steady may win the race, but it takes the teeth out of the movie's mouth, and the film can't have any bite with soft gums alone.

Based on one of his short stories, "The Boogeyman" doesn't land all the way down in the lower tenth percentile of Stephen King adaptations. That dishonor remains reserved for the truly awful straight-to-video King creepers of the 1990s. Nevertheless, "The Boogeyman" still lands in the lower half, probably even the lowest quarter of King adaptations that count as inessential entries in the horror master's movie oeuvre.

When a horror movie's most macabre moments consist mainly of knobs turning, doors creaking, and slow walks down dark hallways, you know you're treading trodden trails. Even the high school bitch has blonde hair because "The Boogeyman" never met a tired trope it didn't welcome with eager arms.

I suppose being unable to recall anything more than the most minor details a mere three months later could be seen as a good thing. After all, how often does anyone get a second chance to experience something for what seems like the first time? Trouble is, the flavorless taste reminds you that you've doubled up on a plain nothingburger with nearly no nutritional value.

Review Score: 45

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