Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Written and Directed by Mary Dauterman
Booger is a body horror/comedy treatise on grief and loss. Anna’s best friend Izzy has just died in a tragic bicycle accident. The only remnant from their relationship is Booger, a cat that the two Brooklyn roommates took in. When Booger bites Anna and runs away, Anna becomes the proverbial crazy cat lady in more ways than one. Grief and comedy are a tough pairing, and this story struggles to marry the two competing themes. Booger just played at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival.
There is something very personal about the story of Booger. A catharsis. Or a cat-tharsis, if you don’t mind the pun. I can respect the effects of trauma and loss as a horror theme. The key for this story to work is the empathic bond between the protagonist and the audience. We join this story in media res, with the tragedy already in place and the drift into melancholy madness about to begin.
The Cast of Booger:
- Grace Glowicki plays Anna, a young Brooklyn worker drone whose life is just beginning a descent into depression and despair. The only thing remaining from her friendship with roomie is an angry black cat named Booger.
- Sofia Dobrushin plays Izzy, who we meet in flashbacks. Izzy and Anna were a goofy pair, reveling in karaoke, making TikToks, and partying. She recently perished and we see her in flashbacks.
- Garrick Bernard plays Max, Anna’s boyfriend who tries hard to comfort Anna, but is rebuffed and finds their relationship on the rocks due to Anna’s transformation.
- Marcia DeBonis plays Joyce, an older neighbor who adored Izzy and Anna. She is very outward with her sadness and wants to share her feelings with the reluctant Anna.
- Heather Matarazzo plays Ellen, the local pet store owner and awkwardly eccentric hipster.
- Richard Perez plays Devon, Anna’s exasperated boss.
A BRIEF SYNOPSIS OF BOOGER:
We are introduced with a cell phone replay of the life of Izzy and Anna, two young women full of verve and silliness who have taken in a stray cat who climbed in through the balcony window, and Izzy fell in love with. Izzy names the cat Booger. Anna has retained Izzy’s phone and continues to text her even though a reply will never be sent. She is so lost in her loss that she is letting her responsibilities slip. Late on rent, absent from work, and ignoring her friends, Anna is clearly not in a good emotional or mental space.
When she tries to prevent Booger from eating a house plant, the cat bites her and bolts out the balcony window, exiting in the way he arrived in her life. Anna goes out into the neighborhood, but Booger can’t be found. She channels her grief into finding the Booger, pushing away offers of help and comfort from those around her.
As she continues her search, she exhibits strange behaviors and physical manifestations. She is becoming a cat. Slowly. Her festering wound will not heal. Booger has triggered a transformation in Anna. She is sucking on her hair, forcing her to cough up hairballs. When she leaves canned cat food on the stoop to try and lure Booger back, she succumbs to the temptation and devours the cat food herself. Startlingly, she’s developing fangs. Her mental decay manifests in visions of herself lost in fields of fur (or is it hair?)
Can Anna manage to claw her way back to sanity before she goes full crazy cat lady? Her obsession and transformation threaten to make her an alley cat, lost to the world through her grief.
EVALUATION OF BOOGER
Director Mary Dauterman explained in an interview in Without Your Head that Booger was influenced by Dauterman’s isolation during the Covid pandemic. The movie explores the bonds of female friendship and the devastation of the breaking of those bonds. Glowicki conveys the coping trauma very well. If you assign her to the Kubler-Ross grief calculator, she is freshly into her trauma and is in full denial mode, and you can feel that in Glowicki’s performance.
The difficulty is that she is so closed off from the very beginning of the movie, she is hard to associate with. You don’t get to see much of her before losing Izzy, so the only impression you get is Mad Anna. She is unlikeable. It does not help that the people who surround her have an array of awkward and cringe-worthy personality traits. I realize that this is meant for light comedy, but the supporting cast managed to annoy me as much as they annoyed Anna. You don’t blame her for isolating herself given the oddballs that want to help her.
I also would have liked more lycanthropy. More cat transformation. I know that a small independent film has limited resources for effects, but even something like contact lenses or whiskers would have been great. Introducing the fang indicated a willingness to go into the fantastic, so you could have gone down that path. Otherwise, it is less body horror and more of a psychological horror trope. That would have been a perfectly fair move, but the decision was made to take a couple of steps down the path of transmogrification. So, why not commit to it?
CONCLUSION
This is a compact story that was worth telling. Grief stories can be powerful in a horror setting, particularly when coupled with mental illness. Movies like The Lodge, The Babadook, A Dark Song, and Midsommar all traveled down the path of sadness and reckoning successfully. Anna is set up to be a tragic heroine in that vein, but the comedy dilutes the effect. If the comedy were broader, and more slapstick perhaps it would been more successful. READ: If the comedy was funnier… it would have been better. The promise of a comic crazy cat lady was an opportunity lost. Instead, we got a sad catless cat lady.
The premise is still interesting. The ending of the movie is satisfying, and the reveal of the nature of Booger at the conclusion works. There are good components to the film, but when you want to shake sense into the protagonist and shoo away the supporting cast, it doesn’t connect as well as it should have.
This film is not rated, but it would likely garner a PG-13 rating, though a few F-Bombs may put this over the edge, and there are scenes of alcohol bingeing. Booger just played at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival 2024 and has been on the film festival circuit since the Fantasia Film Festival in 2023. It now has distribution from Dark Sky Films, so it will likely find its way to streaming soon.
Review by Eric Li
