In Mary Dauterman’s Booger, trauma and transformation take over a young woman grieving the death of her best friend.
Director: Mary Dauterman
Genre: Body horror, Comedy
Run Time: 78′
US Release: September 13, 2024
UK Release: TBA
Where to Watch: in select US theaters & VOD
Until just days ago, Anna (Grace Glowicki, of Strawberry Mansion) and Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin, of Mean Girls) were inseparable flatmates who committed countless evenings to video, like shameless karaoke renditions of Rupert Holmes’ Piña Colada Song. But Izzy, after an accident on her bike, has died, leaving Anna suddenly alone in their apartment with only these recorded memories left for small comfort.
Alone except for Booger, a stray cat who had been taken in by Izzy and who the friends looked after together. Anna relies on Booger to feel connected to Izzy after her passing but, in an attempt to stop him eating a houseplant, he bites Anna and flees, leaving her life as quickly as he’d entered it. Grieving and nursing a wound that shows little sign of healing, Anna starts putting signs up around town to find the missing cat. At the same time, she’s coughing up hairballs, rubbing herself against trees, and following a small patch of sunlight as it slowly makes its way across the room.
Mary Dauterman’s directorial debut gets under the skin. Trauma manifests as physical metamorphosis, as Anna loses her sense of self to overwhelming feelings of loss and helplessness. First she falls behind on rent, then she stops showing up at work, next she’s tracking a rodent as it scurries around in the walls.
An animalistic impulse takes the wheel, leaving Anna irritable and desperate. When her boyfriend Max (Garrick Bernard) says he’s been journalling to cope with Izzy’s passing, Anna is mad at him for feeling what she’s feeling. How can he be so level-headed, when her whole world has crumbled? Instead of grieving together, Anna takes Izzy’s death personally. What she bottles up inside finds its way to the surface in some gnarly and comical body horror, as Booger lives on in Anna.
There isn’t much else below the surface here; this is a story about grief and how it throws everything out of control. If some films are comparable to epic novels, Booger is a short genre-fiction. It delights in its own oddness, never dwelling for too long on Anna’s legitimate pain before reminding you she’s turning into a cat by showing her staring at goldfish in a tank or twitching her nose. As such, it lacks an emotional gut punch, but makes a fine point about the physicality of emotional devastation. Anna can’t stop what’s happening to her and that powerlessness exists most strongly in processing the loss of someone close to your heart.
By obsessing over Booger’s disappearance, she holds on when she ought to be letting go. She leaves Max’s in the middle of the night to continue her hunt, refusing to believe the cat has gone too. Her denial is disorientating, disrupting her personal and professional life with no clear path to healing. Like Booger running away, the videos on her phone are agony to watch.
As more comes to light about Izzy and what she had planned for her life, there’s a brief moment Anna has to consider how well she really knew her best friend. It adds complexity to her grief, as she mourns the person she knew and the one she thought she knew. Had they had more time together, a question mark would have hung over their future. This way, via tragedy, Anna and Izzy will always have been best friends to the end. Is one better than the other?
But this is passed over in favour of some more gag-inducing transformations, which is the lasting impression of Booger. The emotive videos and whether Izzy was fully honest with Anna are touching considerations in a story about loss, but for the most part, Dauterman is far more interested in what it means to turn into a cat while mourning.
Booger will be available to watch in select US theaters and on VOD from September 13, 2024.
