Review: The Boogeyman (2023)

This movie needed to be rated R.

Almost every critique I have of this movie comes back to the PG-13 limitation placed on this (on a Stephen King adaptation!  After IT had already come out!).  It works within that limitation well, but it is fighting a losing battle against that PG-13 rating.

To give a clear example of how that rating cut this movie off at the knees: Only 3 people die in the entire film (not necessarily a bad thing), and 2 of those are within the first 15 minutes of this roughly 100 minute movie and both are offscreen.  You cannot have a child-murdering monster movie where nothing happens for a large chunk of the movie.

Even calling the titular Boogeyman a child-murdering monster is a bit of a stretch.  Unlike the aforementioned IT adaptation, this movie pulls its punches to a severe degree when it comes to actually endangering the children.  It's almost as if the Boogeyman is going out of its way to not kill the child and teenager it is terrorizing.  It doesn't matter how many scenes you have of the creature slowly menacing Sadie and Sawyer (Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair) - even if they are well-done escalations of the creature's threat - if ultimately the creature doesn't do anything other than scare them, it loses quite a bit of its mystique.

And it's frustrating because the movie is actually good despite this.  Both Thatcher and Blair give  strong performances, as does Chris Messina as their father and Madison Hu as Sadie's friend Bethany.  Hu might just be the best performance in the film even if it feels like a decent chunk of her character was cut.  David Dastmalchian also makes a cameo appearance as a previous victim of the monster and spins quite a bit of gold within his shortened screentime.

As mentioned above, director Rob Savage does effectively build tension throughout the film, with a major assist from cinematographer Eli Born.  Lighting is especially important for this movie, and genuine effort was put into making the scenes dark while still allowing the audience to see just enough of the monster to let the imagination run wild.  The final full reveal of the Boogeyman is a bit disappointing, but they do build up to that reveal masterfully.

So yeah, this is a pretty decent movie that just needed the the handcuffs taken off of it to be great.  Ah well, I think I'd still recommend it, but never as a first choice.

6.5 out of 10