By David Dent
Director Rob Savage’s transition from the indie lockdown Zoom séance movie Host to mainstream US features has been less than eventful.
His follow-up to his hugely successful micro-budget debut was the very dull Dashcam. And now we have his latest feature, based on a Stephen King novella, a movie which operates within the rather safe PG-13 parameters but offers little to excite.
With a script provided by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, whose work contributed greatly to the success of A Quiet Place, the story maps out the (mis) fortunes of the Harper family. Their mum has recently passed away in a car accident, and daughters Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Sadie are left respectively with a fear of the dark and a fuck you attitude to life.
Meanwhile, one of home worker therapist dad Will’s (Chris Messina) clients believes that a monster killed his family, setting off a chain of events which will see the same beast infiltrate and feed off the grief-stricken world of the Harpers.
Although technically superb, with some terrific performances and some claustrophobic set pieces, The Boogeyman ultimately fails by giving us a grief/heartache/creature setup that we’ve seen before (The Babadook anyone?) and with which we’ve become overfamiliar.
PG-13 horror tends to rely on human stories to create the audience connection against which the rather tepid (CGI) horror is eventually introduced, but this setup, along with the well-telegraphed jump scares, has become deadeningly overfamiliar. I had such expectations of Savage after Host, but my fears that he’d get swept up in the Hollywood hitmaking fright machine seem to have been realised.
The Boogeyman is available now in UK cinemas.
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