[FGBFF 2024 Review] 'Booger' is a Meow-Mixed Bag of Dread and Absurd Humor

​Every once in a while, I’ll come across an SNL skit that is so strange, so unbearably uncomfortable, that I want to change the channel but can’t seem to pull my eyes away from the bizarre scene before me. That’s more or less the vibe of writer/director Mary Dauterman’s Booger, a meow-mix of psychological dread and gross-out body horror that doesn’t quite have the grace of the feline subject at its center, but nevertheless manages to deliver a thoughtful tale about grief.
 
Having just played at the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, Booger follows Anna (Grace Glowicki), who has just lost her best friend fur-ever and roommate, Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin). Struggling to accept her death, Anna finds her entire life crumbling around her. Things go from bad to worse when Izzy’s cat, Booger, bites Anna on the hand, setting off a strange transformation within the young woman that she may never be able to come back from.
 
Less of a creature feature—it isn’t at all—and more of a psychological descent brought on by cat scratch fever, Booger puts a collar on the viewer and drags them into a landscape of bizarre terror through the troubled eyes of Anna. Those of you that have experienced the sudden death of a loved one—as I have—may see some of yourself in the poor woman at first, played with a quiet pain by Glowicki that gradually becomes more visible through her feline transformation. Dauterman drops us right into the middle of someone experiencing the worst moment of their life, incorporating subtle visuals to hint at Anna’s declining mental state. She dresses in yellow (often a color that represents depression). She still has a container of pad Thai with a note from her telling Izzy not to eat it. And she sits around watching videos of the two of them on Izzy’s phone, an item that the girl’s mother, Joyce (Marcia DeBonis) desperately wants, but is told can’t be found. While we don’t see quite as much as some may like of the two girls interacting together to build the relationship that has been lost, Dauterman’s use of phone videos that flash across the screen generate a substantial sense of uneasiness. Perhaps that’s because it’s an honest depiction of how some of us grieve, isolating ourselves in a dark room, eyes glued to a cold screen.

​An a-typical were-cat movie—this aint Cat People—Dauterman’s film resides within the cinema of the strange. Rather than a physical transformation, Anna’s change occurs more internally as she takes on the personality traits of Booger the cat. Eyeing birds with hunger. Eating cat food. Lapping at drinks with her tongue. It’s all very weird and uncomfortable and of course silly as the filmmaker attempts to walk a fine line between psychological dread and absurd humor, stumbling more often than not. Booger feels like an awkward comedy sketch that becomes horror simply because it keeps going, and going, and going, stretching out the premise until you the audience feel as mad as our unstable protagonist. All through Anna’s absurd antics, the story rarely feels as if it’s moving much, stuck in a place between odd (though inspired) visions of unsettling madness and clunky comedy that works just fine as small skits but doesn’t do much to drive things forward. Anna’s changes hardly affect the world around here in any meaningful way. You could remove everything involving the cat and still land somewhere close to the same space as where the film finishes.
 
 
Booger does a decent job of getting the audience to squirm by way of some nasty body horror, whether it be the breathing wound of the cat bite or Anna coughing up hefty hairballs, but it disappoints by not taking the terror of her transformation further. Whether limited by budget or intention, Dauterman’s film ultimately comes off as quite tame, all things considered. And I’m not saying it needs Anna to transform into a full-on monster and go on some frenzied killing spree. That isn’t this story. But with little consequence occurring around her-despite her increasingly selfish behavior in caring for no one’s feelings but her own—the dread that Dauterman crafts is only so effective. Tension and suspense fall flat in the absence of any real sense of danger. It sometimes seems as if the director is aware of this, substituting horror for gross gags and close-ups of Anna eating or brushing her teeth to make us shift in our seats. That works for a time, but struggles to maintain attention on the way to a sudden finish that doesn’t quite feel earned.
 
Though Booger may not juggle its psychologically-induced dread or off-putting humor as well as Dauterman intends, the filmmaker nevertheless displays unique sensibilities that show promise with some refining. It’s far from purr-fect—sorry, I had to—yet there’s a surprising sweetness to this oddity of a film that should prick at the hearts of anyone who has struggled with the loss of another. We all wish we had nine lives, but Booger reminds us we only get one, and we need to cherish that.

By Matt Konopka