99 min | PG-13 | June 2, 2023 | 20th Century Studios
A family still raw from the mother’s death gets a visit from a stranger who insists a monster killed his children. The thing he carries does not leave when he does. Grief turns out to be the best door a monster ever found.
The Boogeyman opens on a family that cannot say the word grief out loud. Will Harper is a therapist who works out of his home and treats strangers while ignoring his own daughters. Sadie and Sawyer have lost their mother to a car crash and their father to his office. Then a man named Lester Billings arrives for an unscheduled session and brings something with him. The film uses a closet monster as a delivery system for the thing the Harpers refuse to discuss. The real subject is a house where everyone mourns alone.
Sophie Thatcher plays Sadie as a teenager who has decided that anger is safer than sadness. She carries the film with a watchful stillness that makes her fear legible before the monster shows up. Vivien Lyra Blair plays Sawyer, the younger sister who refuses to sleep without a light, and she sells the terror of an empty hallway. Chris Messina plays Will as a man fluent in other people’s pain and useless with his own. David Dastmalchian appears briefly as Lester Billings and turns a single scene into the most frightening stretch of the film. Marin Ireland plays Rita Billings as a woman wrecked by what the creature already took from her.
Rob Savage directs from a script by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, and Mark Heyman that stretches a short Stephen King story into a feature. Savage built his reputation on found-footage horror and brings that discipline to the dark. He keeps the creature off-screen for most of the film and lets sound design do the work. A rolling light-up moon that Sawyer carries becomes the movie’s best instrument, throwing a small sphere of light while the monster waits just outside it. The cinematography treats every doorway as a threat and every lamp as a temporary truce. The jump scares are built, not sprung.
The Boogeyman knows how to stage a scare and rarely cheats to get one. It also softens the King story until the dread has somewhere comfortable to land. The family drama is sturdier than the horror, and the ending trades atmosphere for a more conventional confrontation. Savage delivers a clean, frightening studio picture that never quite earns the despair its premise promises. This is competent horror about grief that flinches before it cuts deep.