The Boogeyman (2023)

The Boogeyman 2023 is a new interpretation of the boogeyman legend done a multitude of times in the past. Compared to those older entries this one focuses on the characters and their problems that the boogeyman is the catalyst to healing. The handling of grief when losing a parent at a young age and how the world reacts is written well. Meanwhile, the entity itself is not managed as well as the therapy.

Will and his two daughters are stuck managing their own grief of their mother’s death. They are alone as everyone else around them, including the therapists, seem to act on script with little assistance to them.

Will is a therapist himself and shows the greatest inability to manage. He can dispense help to his clients, but he himself has turned to the bottle. Going through the motions of being a good father, yet his discussions of the event leading to his wife’s death are few and especially not to his kids.

Sawyer, the youngest, is having nightmares of something in her closet and other monsters in her room. She is given re-assurance by both Sadie and her father but you can only see her actually reach out to Sadie when anything truly bothers her. She is left to her own devices to battle this entity at first until, thankfully, her sister tries to help.

Sadie is a teenager, only recently returning to school. Her peers don’t understand what she is going through. They misspeak or show no regret over any panic attacks that Sadie may have as a result of those errors. She is trying to keep the family together all while battling her own memories and isolation created by her mother’s death and this lack of understanding.

When the boogeyman makes its appearance the sisters are the ones who must deal with it. At first they look to the therapist. When that fails though, by only intensifying Sawyer’s fears of the shadowy creature hunting her. Sadie is the only one to take the steps to try and learn more of it, not pushing Sawyer’s fears and statements aside as ‘just imagination’. The quest to learn more about it pushes Sadie to confront all this grief within her family since truly they are the only ones that can do so.

Where the writing fails though is making the boogeyman a consistent threat. Its rules seem to change as the story progresses creating confusion. Initially, even a ball in the shape of the moon with LED lights inside it makes the entity freak out and retreat into the shadows or the closet. A scene later it is able to smash the very same light. This could mean it can learn to tolerate light long enough to destroy it. Later scenes though show it can withstand candle light and even the bright light of a TV screen to still attack. These are much brighter than even that small moon lamp that was smashed.

With this knowledge learned early on you would think Sadie and Sawyer would turn lights on everywhere they go. Not the case, even after hearing sounds and knowing this thing is there rarely are there any attempts to turn on the lights in the room or even look for a switch. Preferring to slowly creep towards the darkness where the sound came from long after both of them have been attacked by this thing skulking in the dark.

The overall story of grief and coming together as a family is brought about solidly with this backdrop of malevolent force waiting for the vulnerable. A watch is definitely recommended for a supernatural story that has a good mix of scares and emotional building between characters. A bit of suspension is needed though to not yell at the screen for Sadie to find a damn light switch.