Grief is a challenging experience to depict in any medium due to its deeply subjective nature and the presentational challenges this presents. Whether it’s the raw, deeply interior portrayal of loss in Manchester by the Sea, the darkly comedic exploration in Fleabag, or the abstracted-cum-gonzo horror treatment of Hereditary, grief is one of the few topics where its nearly impossible for viewers’ experiences not to shape the material in such essential way. Mary Dauterman’s feature debut Booger is the latest such film to attempt to tackle this elusive subject matter, employing an ambitious blend of genres to ultimately mixed results.
Booger centers around Anna (Grace Glowicki), a young woman struggling to cope with the sudden death of her best friend and roommate, Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin). As Anna grapples with her grief, she begins to exhibit strange, cat-like symptoms after being bitten by Booger, a mischievous black cat that she and Izzy had adopted together. The subsequent bizarre physical transformation that is visited upon Anna becomes the film’s core conceptual motif, utilized to make visual Anna’s complicated mourning process. Throw in pronounced elements of dark comedy, psychological tension, and grotesque body horror, and Booger certainly has boasts the potential to deliver a unique and layered exploration of loss.
In execution, this is partially accurate. Dauterman demonstrates a strong sense of visual style and atmosphere, and her film is punctuated with surreal dream sequences, distorted imagery, and effective practical effects that convey the eerie, disorienting experience of Anna’s grief. Booger‘s visual language is bold and evocative, pulling the audience into Anna’s deteriorating mental state and effectively communicating the particular subjectivity of her experience rather merely detailing it via exposition. The creative use of lighting, color, and unsettling cat-like prosthetics injects an intriguing off-kilter energy into the proceedings, and Booger‘s more grotesque scenes — Anna dry-heaving hairballs or gnawing on cat food — are both striking and darkly humorous, showcasing Dauterman’s instincts as a director and building of the boldness of her short film work.
But the film also struggles to maintain any narrative momentum, often feeling more like a series of impressive visual sequences loosely strung together in proximity rather than parts of a larger vision that enliven each other. And while in its very conception, Booger leans heavily on the familiar — bordering on interminably so — horror metaphor of grief, it fails to ever move beyond this well-worn territory on thematic or intellectual terms, despite its aesthetic merits, leaving the emotional beats feeling flat and predetermined. Anna’s behaviors following the cat bite, while not to be mistaken for deep or layered, do at least offer a more nuanced depiction of the grief’s complexities than viewers are often given, but their repetitive nature across the film’s runtime can start to border on tedious rather than revealing, and as a result the narrative never evolves much beyond its initial setup and conceit.
Booger is more successful in its moments of dark comedy — just peep Heather Matarazzo taking a shit in a litter box and try to hold back a laugh. These comedic bits work precisely because they lean into the bizarre at Booger‘s core, establishing a balance that keeps the film from feeling overly dour and offering pleasant interruptions to the familiar metaphorical arc. This strength is further supported by a game cast, particularly Glowicki, who navigates the blend of horror and comedy with a deft touch, providing a necessary grounded sense of reality amidst the absurdity. As it stands, then, while Booger is an undeniably uneven affair sometimes plagued by the moldy whiff of the commonplace, Dauterman’s stylish film ultimately succeeds at capturing the extreme and unpredictable ways we attempt to cope with the void left behind by those we love, living up to the grotesquerie of its title but rising above its negative connotations.
DIRECTOR: Mary Dauterman; CAST: ddd; DISTRIBUTOR: Dark Sky Films; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: September 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 18 min.
