BOOGER - Mark Reviews Movies

Booger, Dark Sky Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 12, 2024

In Booger, a couple of friends who live together in a New York City apartment take in a stray cat, and sometime later, one of the roommates, the one who mostly took care of the cat, dies. Grief can take on all sorts of forms, and for the surviving friend, it apparently results in her imagining herself or actually transforming into some kind of human-feline hybrid.

That's the beginning and pretty much the end of any ideas in writer/director Mary Dauterman's debut feature, which doesn't have much to say about grief or anything else, really. It's a movie based on a single conceit—that we watch Anna (Grace Glowicki) gradually become more and more cat-like as she avoids her obvious mourning over the friend's sudden and unexpected death. The whole movie, then, becomes a kind of evasion, if only because it tries to convince us it's saying more than it actually is.

Instead, the affair becomes a gag, as well as one that attempts to be gag-worthy as Anna's body and behavior change to closer match a cat's. Some of it is gross, such as how the woman starts coughing up hairballs (Dauterman includes a close-up of her throat reflexively gagging, which is probably more unsettling than any of the effects), but most of it silly sights or shallow representations of how Anna truly feels beneath her tough, careless exterior. One of the latter moments has Anna curling up on giant tuft of black cat hair, which isn't much different than the character's real life of sitting around the apartment, avoiding work and any other responsibilities, and just being generally miserable.

The central metaphor, in other words, doesn't make much sense on a practical or, well, metaphorical level. It comes about after the death of Anna's best friend Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin), under circumstances that aren't even explain until much later—as if the mystery is meant to bolster how little happens in this story. Anna tries to care for the cat, named Booger during a montage of the two finding it in their apartment and deciding to keep it. After the cat's new caretaker tries to stop it from eating a house plant, Booger bites Anna before escaping through the window and down the fire escape.

From there, the story's attention is split in two. Half of it shows Anna in reality, screening phone calls from work and practically everyone else. She becomes obsessed with finding the missing cat, wandering around the neighborhood calling for it and putting up flyers with Booger's photo (In what was hopefully a well-earned favor to the filmmaker, Heather Matarazzo plays a weird pet store owner, who criticizes Anna for not using a color photograph and, in a dream sequence, is later seen crouching over a litter box).

All the while, she's also distancing herself from her boyfriend Max (Garrick Bernard), who's portrayed as so emotionally ignorant that we can't tell if that's the truth or if it's closer to how he comes across later, and Izzy's mother Joyce (Marcia DeBonis), whose attempts to put together a memorial for her dead daughter are played as inconveniences for Anna. That depiction definitely isn't the truth about Joyce, as becomes clear near the end of the movie, so just from that, we can eventually tell Dauterman is toying with perspective. In terms of its form, the movie is so blandly and straightforwardly presented, though, that there's no distinction between Anna's point of view and reality.

The exception, perhaps, is the other half or so of the story, which shows Anna undergoing her slow transformation. The bite wound starts to look infected, but then, a long, stiff black hair, much like one from Booger's coat, grows from it. It hurts when she tries pulling it out. Soon enough, Anna is also licking her own hair, hacking up balls of it, finding herself drawn to canned cat food, wakes up from sleeping in tight positions, and even knocks a glass off a bar while flirting with a random guy. She also doesn't seem to understand how a toilet works, which seems more like an Anna problem than one of feline transmogrification.

The jokes here are obvious and, as a result, not funny, but more to the main issue with Booger, they're a strained mechanism for keeping these characters and any emotional reality at a distance. That might be how Anna feels, but in even making that truth into a comedic bit, Dauterman makes us wonder what the point of any of this might be.

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