You’re right, it’s quite a title, and it could have been worse as, if Ted Nugent wasn’t such an unacceptable figure these days, Mary Dauterman’s feature debut could have been called Cat Scratch Fever. Anna, the film’s protagonist, receives a nasty clawing from her pet cat Booger that results in something a bit more exotic than tetanus – she starts behaving erratically, coughing up hair and even gets a craving for cat food. It’s a gross-out version of Cat People then, but featuring the kind of gradual transformation seen in films like The Fly and Ginger Snaps, except that’s not the whole story. Booger was a stray cat tamed by Anna’s late friend Izzy, and the absence of Izzy is taking a psychological toll on Anna that might explain her sudden feline behaviour.
Booger is, therefore, a horror story about trauma – something which was quite a novelty when David Gordon Green made his first Halloween film five years ago. Since then it’s been ran into the ground (not least by David Gordon Green), to the extent where audiences might need some persuading to see another one. Happily, it’s very easy to make the case for Booger as, unlike nearly all of the other horror movies tilling this field, it’s extremely funny. Grace Glowicki’s performance as Anna is successfully pitched as a body-horror riposte to all those slovenly, slackerish, proudly flawed female characters currently prominent in comic novels and television series. She’s Fleabag, if she had actual fleas.
There are as many solid gags as there are moments that will make you gag, and at one point Dauterman’s camera goes inside Glowicki’s mouth as she retches up another hairball. A lot of Booger‘s positive qualities come from how much fun Dauterman is having telling this story – both as a scriptwriter and as a director. When Anna plasters her neighbourhood with lost-cat photos, rather than show her doing this Dauterman cuts to a rain of posters against a black background, the sort of visual that you might see alongside a spinning newspaper in a vintage film noir. The old-fashioned charm of that image raised a smile from me, but it also affirms that Dauterman is committed to strong visual storytelling.
A lot of Booger‘s positive qualities come from how much fun Dauterman is having telling this story – both as a scriptwriter and as a director.
This comes in particularly handy when it comes to the bereavement that sets the plot in motion, as her visual technique completely revitalises a trend in horror storytelling many people will be tired of. Rather than making heavy weather out of Anna’s loss, Dauterman and editor Kyle Moriarty create brisk but painfully telling montages, cutting from old standard definition mobile phone videos of Anna and Izzy larking around, to Anna’s lonely present-day life. Without a word of exposition, it tells you exactly what’s happened before the start of the film and how it’s affected Anna.
Comparing Booger to the work of Terrence Malick might seem perverse – largely because people tend not to invoke Malick unless they’re watching a film with a shot of a cornfield at sunset – and Booger is nothing like that, but it does suggest Dauterman has absorbed the influence of Malick’s challenges to conventional film narrative. The cast are impeccable, with Garrick Bernard managing to give Anna’s boyfriend Max a certain humanity whilst also being aware that he’s a complete doofus. Sofia Dobrushin deserves much credit for making the mobile phone clips of Izzy so warm and relatable that we miss her as much as Anna does. Covering body horror, psychological drama, slacker comedy and absurdist fantasy in less than eighty minutes, it reaches a genuinely cheering ending and leaves you eager for whatever Dauterman might cough up next.
Booger played a Soho Horror Fest 2023 (International Premiere)
