![]() ![]() Sadie is a vulnerable loner and wears one of her mother’s dresses to school only for a bully to smash food all over it Sawyer is so timid that she sleeps with a giant light ball. In ways both proverbial and literal, Sadie and Sawyer are left in the dark. Lester’s suicide is just another death in the Harper world, and like the loss of Will’s wife and the children’s mother, he doesn’t really want to talk about it. After sharing a gruesome tale about the death of his children and a strong monster, he sneaks away and hangs himself in the dead mother’s art closet, planting the monster in their home. The Boogeyman enters the Harpers' hollowed-out and extra creaky home in the form of Lester (from the short story), played here by David Dastmalchian at his most cryptic and also as a type of character development shorthand. Instead, in between some decent flashbang sequences where the girls are terrorized at night by something we only see in brief moments, we are stuck with a dour tone that numbs us and makes the film feel much longer than it is. But “The Boogeyman” does not have the emotional tact to make us feel such vital sorrow, only pity for the sisters (Thatcher, giving an excellent genre performance, is our lifeline not to lose interest entirely). We sense the grief in the home’s stark atmosphere and the craven blacks and browns from production designer Jeremy Woodward and cinematographer Eli Born that make darkness prevalent even in the daytime. ![]() The family’s mother passed away a year ago in a car accident. ![]() Will Harper, and his two daughters, Sadie ( Sophie Thatcher) and the younger Sawyer ( Vivien Lyra Blair) through the murk. It’s both soft around the edges from its reliance on peek-a-boo jump scares and also so deadset on being the latest gut-wrenching story about grief, this time dragging a therapist father, Chris Messina’s Dr. Savage has thrown together a wonky seance for PG-13 horror movies from over a decade ago, with the smothering self-seriousness of recent “elevated horror” debates intact. Now, adapted here by “ A Quiet Place” writers Scott Beck & Bryan Woods, and Mark Heyman, the dark-loving, door-bursting, child-terrorizing night monster’s significance is even broader with the significance of loss. When "The Boogeyman" short story came from “The Mind of Stephen King,” as this movie's poster boasts, the mythic creature was stretched into a broad embodiment of fear and paranoia, conveyed in a two-person conversation and capped with a cheesy twist. ![]()
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