Booger
Written and Directed by Mary Dauterman
Starring Grace Glowicki, Garrick Bernard, Heather Matarazzo, and Marica DeBonis
Unrated
Runtime: 78 minutes
On digital September 13

by Rachel Shatto, Staff Writer

Few things are as deeply aching or brimming with unanswered questions than a pet gone missing. The senselessness, the despair, the regret. The repeated refrain of “how could this have happened?” In that way, it's analogous to the feelings that come along with the unexpected loss of a loved one. In Booger, the feature debut of writer/director Mary Dauterman, lost pet anxiety becomes the metaphor and the way Anna (Grace Glowicki) — deep into denial after the sudden death of her best friend, roommate, and cat owner, Izzy — first compartmentalizes then processes her overwhelming loss.

When we meet Anna, it's the eve of Izzy’s memorial — and so soon after her passing that her leftovers in the fridge are still fresh. She’s not coping well. Anna has shut down in an almost fugue-like state, avoiding work, her boyfriend, her landlord, and, most of all, herself. This detachment accelerates when Izzy’s cat, the titular Booger, bites her and disappears out a window, leaving Anna searching in vain for the lost, beloved pet. It’s not long before she has plenty to distract her from the missing Booger. Anna begins experiencing a strange feline transformation complete with pointed teeth, a blood lust for bugs, a revolting craving for cat food, and a penchant for coughing up enormous hairballs.

It’s grotesque, visceral, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, but, above all, it’s purposeful. While Anna may not be able to consciously connect to her grief, it's still inside her: changing her, haunting her, twisting her from the inside out into something less emotional and more primal.

The horror genre is no stranger to exploring grief. It's perhaps the most common throughline in contemporary horror. To be fair, current world events have given us plenty of reasons to grieve, but Booger infuses its exploration of the emotion with humor, surreal visuals, and pops of gross-out body horror; all give the film a refreshing tonal boost. Adding to the unique mood of the film is Glowicki’s performance: she approaches the role not with a sense of melancholy, but with a fearless-of-consequence aloofness. It’not unlike a cat methodically knocking fragile objects off a shelf, and it’s equal parts heartbreaking and cathartic to behold.

Booger is a fascinating reversal on another famed werecat film, Cat People (1942). Its doomed feline femme fatale Irena’s transformation is triggered by giving into her passion and rage, Anna’s transformation is awakened by emotional suppression. The more emotionally collapsed Anna becomes the more the beast awakens.

All this is represented by a series of surreal dream sequences, a highlight of the film that see Anna lost in cloying worlds of fur, or running into familiar faces in strange and unsettling places. The visuals are striking and give the film a sense of uncanny. While it never goes full bore into horror, Booger instead illustrates the haunted human heart in the wake of a tragic loss. Those looking fort traditional scares may be left cold, but for those who know the all too real terror of grief will appreciate Booger's strange and ultimately empathetic take on the well-worn theme.