Transformative Booger Reveals the Feral Feline Hidden Underneath the Skin
Anna (Grace Glowicki) is obsessed with Booger, her late roommate and best friend Izzy’s (Sofia Dobrushin) beloved cat. She’s not paying her rent. She’s never logging into work. She’s late with all of her bills and it’s likely the power to her apartment will be disconnected. But Booger? Anna would do anything for that feline right now, even after the creature bites her on the palm of her hand and escapes at the window headed for who-knows-where.
For such a small cat, Booger sure packs a mean punch. The wound refuses to heal. Worse, Anna is starting to get sick. She’s craving peculiar types of food and she’s got hair growing in unusual places. Anna’s erratic, some might even call it feral, behavior has caught the eye of her boyfriend Max (Garrick Bernard), and he’s understandably worried about her.
Writer and director Mary Dauterman makes an impressive feature-length debut with Booger, a stripped-down piece of metaphorical body horror that deals with themes of friendship, loss, grief, and family in a bevy of inventive ways. While no Cat People (few films are, Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 classic an all-time great), there’s still plenty here to get excited about.
Surprisingly funny and centered on a wonderful performance from Glowicki, Dauterman proves to be an inventive filmmaker with plenty of original ideas. And if all of them don’t always connect? That’s perfectly okay because the ones that do leave a lasting impression that linger in the psyche long after this drama has reached its engaging, if a bit too predictably pat, conclusion.
At the center of this psychologically transformative nonsense is something far more universally personal and emotionally intimate. Anna and Izzy were best friends, maybe even more than that. But in some ways, they took their relationship for granted. Especially for Anna, it appears as if the pair assumed this connection would always be there, even if one of them were to suddenly move out of state or another was on the verge of taking a romantic relationship to the next level.
All of this is why the inexplicable suddenness of Izzy’s death derails Anna’s life with such nuclear precision. Some of this is played with tongue-in-cheek absurdity, most notably the young woman’s borderline comical refusal to interact for more than a few seconds with her buffoonish boss Devon (Richard Perez, channeling his inner Gary Cole à la Office Space). Other events are portrayed with surprisingly harsh severity. There’s a scene where Izzy’s understandably aggrieved mother (a luminous Marcia DeBonis) offhandedly drops that her daughter was about to uproot her entire life, news that hits Anna like a sledgehammer.
Then there is all of the stuff involving Anna and Booger. Audiences don’t see much of the persnickety feline, and that’s by design. Anna was never close to Izzy’s pet. But now that her best friend is gone, all she can do is become increasingly obsessed with the cat’s welfare. When it disappears through the apartment window after biting the woman’s hand, all bets are off. Illusion and reality blend together with terrifyingly surrealist immediacy, and all Anna can do is hang on for the ride and hope she doesn’t grow fangs and start chasing mice.
Dauterman has some difficulty maintaining a balance between the weird, humorous, and dramatic aspects of her story, and the shifts in tone are jarring. But while she isn’t David Cronenberg or Joe Dante (not yet, at least), the director still shows mesmerizing promise that they’re proceeding down a dynamic path that could potentially lead there. Dauterman brings a determined focus to Anna’s ordeal that comes across as innately personal, especially during the climax. This makes Booger more than just impressive; it also allows it to blossom into something ferociously unforgettable.
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
