The Boogeyman

 Serious representations of grief have been a trend in horror movies for a while now, to the point where it's kind of become a joke. The Boogeyman is a very, very dumb film, but it does one clever thing: Its titular monster is attracted to grief-stricken victims. That way it can have its cake and eat it; It is (or at least tries to be) a serious meditation on bereavement, and it's also a creature feature with an actual, pretty cool monster that's emphatically not a metaphor.

 This is made pretty clear in a pretty ruthless prelude where the monster sneaks into a very young kid's room and kills her. The scene is pretty stylish: floating dots resolve into points of light shed by one of those rotating night light things and the camera roams the room, making what's happening clear while keeping the monster obscured. The whole thing oozes atmosphere and the monster gets a cool conceptual touch as it mimics the voice of the girl's father. Poorly, as if it didn't understand the words it's uttering. A good way to kick off a movie.

 Once that and the title credits are out of the way we're introduced to the Harpers: Sadie (Sophie Thatcher, the troubled teen) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair, the youngest one) and Will (Chris Messina, the dad). They've recently lost their mother/wife and are clearly struggling with the loss; their exchanges are so poorly written and blunt that it's kind of funny. That's unfortunately a running theme in the movie.

 Will runs his psychological practice off a room in the house, and one eventful day a guy called Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) pops up without a booking and starts talking about how a monster started stalking his kids after the youngest died of natural causes, and how the monster ended up killing them and he should have believed them and now everyone thinks he killed them and his life is ruined  and etc. etc. Will, understandably concerned, stalls for time and tries to get the police in, but while he makes the call Lester goes and hangs himself in a closet.

 From there Sawyer, the youngest, starts getting harassed by the monster, who's been transmitted from the Billings to the Harper family through their grief (how very J-Horror of it). Sadie at first doesn't believe her, but soon enough she has a couple of run-ins of her own with The Boogeyman, and starts doing some investigation of the Billings family, tries to come up with plans to kill it, and so on.

 The script, by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman, is, and there's no other way to put this, extremely fucking dumb. The dialog is laughable, there are a ton of plot holes and little stupid details, and its message manages to be both muddled and trite. But - but! it's filled with pretty imaginative sequences that allow director Rob Savage to deliver some pretty great monster stalks and attacks. Some of these are enabled by the script's stupidity, like a bit where the monster comes into a candle-filled room, blowing them out as it goes. Seriously, candles... but they look good, so there they are.

 And it is a good looking, well-made movie in all respects save for the writing. The actors are pretty great, giving good readings of mostly terrible lines, and somehow maintaining a sombre tone even as it's undercut by, oh, I don't know, the psychologist father avoiding talking about trauma by doing the conversational equivalent of running away blocking his ears and singing at the top of his voice. God, it's stupid.

 And no, you can't blame this on the Stephen King short story this is based on. It's been a very, very long time since I read it, but it's just a slip of a tale- basically, Will's session with Lester, less than five percent of the runtime of the movie. The rest is all on the good folk wot writed this.

 Anyhow. The monster effects are good - CGI, but it suits with the spindly, weird-looking bugger. Its appearance is kept vague for a good chunk of the movie, and while it doesn't really change over the film, there's a good trick where we get to find out what its weird-looking teeth actually are late in the movie.

 It does try to do CGI fire in a couple of scenes, which... well, that's usually a mistake; It looks terrible.
 
 It's a very teen-friendly, rabidly PG-13 movie, so blood is kept to a minimum. A couple of the scenes feel a little too tame as a result, but honestly I found it mostly well-judged; This movie doesn't really need gore.

 The cinematography (DP: Eli Born, who did last year's Hellraiser) is excellent, with great use of darkness, sinuous camera movements and ambiance by the bucketful.

 Oh, and points for including a surprising amount of footage from the excellent (and beautiful-looking) game The Pathless in the background on one scene.

 As I grow older I find myself being a lot more forgiving of dumb movies, especially when they've got fun scenes like this one. But The Boogeyman is brought down by a kind of narrative uncanny valley where it looks and sounds like a serious, thoughtful movie, so when you actually pay attention and see how poorly it's written it becomes harder to forgive. That, and a kind of generic, modern horror vibe manage to undo a lot of the goodwill it would have gotten if it wasn't trying and failing so hard at saying something that could be construed as profound.