Mary Dauterman has found a powerful horror combo in cats and loss. It’s what she builds up in her movie Booger, about a woman called Anna that not only loses her best friend Izzy due to a terrible accident but also the cat they brought into their home together when he runs away. One day, Booger just sneaks out an open window and vanishes, like cats so expertly do if given the chance. Dealing with those two losses simultaneously brings about a fair bit of body horror into Anna’s grieving process, and it takes the form of her slowly turning into a cat. And then come the hairballs.
Booger blends comedy, horror, and grief for a story that’s all about metaphor. Anna (played by Grace Glowicki) is grief personified, a character that has been paralyzed by the death of her friend (played by Sofia Dobrushin) to the point she’s manifesting her emotions through the missing cat. Anna thinks finding Booger will bring some aspect of her friend back so she doesn’t have to let her go. Of course, nothing goes the way she wants, and her continued failed attempts at getting the cat back result in her slowly and painfully turning into what she can’t rescue.
Despite the body horror aspects, Booger is not a werecat story. Anna’s transformation is slow, deliberate, and more reliant on perception and specific changes in behavior than the full moon-like affairs we’ve come to expect from werewolves. That said, there are instances where we get smart uses of cat makeup effects to keep the story from being entirely swallowed up by the metaphor.
To get the point across even further, Dauterman opts for nightmare-like scenes in which Booger’s presence looms large (both figuratively and literally) to show just how deep into grief Anna has fallen. These scenes are usually set in dark rooms filled with elusive shadows and mounds of cat hair that speak to the power Anna has afforded to Booger. They do a masterful job of making sure the movie speaks the language of horror well throughout, especially in the more traditional grossout scenes. This is where hairballs come in. These instances are disturbing and visceral, and they don’t become the butt of a joke. Hairballs are coughed up when emotions are at their wildest and they always serve the narrative.
If there’s one thing that can be criticized about the grief metaphor at play here is that Booger doesn’t really go beyond it. It’s about grief from start to finish. That said, Dauterman finds ways to explore the many forms it can take and how certain people can latch on to it for more selfish reasons. Booger’s excellent supporting cast stakes their claim here, with each character adding an important wrinkle to Anna’s emotional arc.
Garrick Bernard as Anna’s boyfriend Max and Marsha DeBonis as Izzy’s grieving mom Joyce are standouts. Max wants to become more involved in his girlfriend’s grief while Joyce wants to hold on to Anna as it keeps her close to her deceased daughter by association. In a sense, each of these characters turn Anna into their ‘cat’ and they want to make sure not to lose her too. Problem is, good intentions don’t always respect personal space, nor replace it. Watching all the chaos that comes out of this helps soften some of the blows the story dishes out. Marsha DeBonis in particular steals the show. Every scene she’s in mixes sadness with comedy incredibly well, and it’s all owed to her performance.
It’s important to note, too, that Dauterman is wholly invested in dealing with female friendship specifically. She’s not interested in turning Anna and Izzy into the cliché of friends that were actually secretly in love the whole time. This is a pitfall many other movies of the kind fail to avoid. The movie is laser-focused on the grief that comes with losing your best friend. Period. It’s not about losing a friend you regret never voicing your romantic feelings to. It’s about coming to terms with the fact that someone you enjoyed sharing your life with, without preconditions or expectations of something more later on, is permanently gone. Whereas missing cats can surprise and come back, there’s no such luck with a dead friend.
Unlike dogs, cats always seem to be on the cusp of escape not because they desperately want out but because they’re led by a kind of curiosity that makes them unpredictable. They’re a great metaphor for life, here one moment and gone the next. Dauterman captures this beautifully with Booger. It manages to be funny without being irreverent, unsettling but never gratuitous, and touching in its ability to portray female friendship as a living thing with its own life cycle. So, if you ever find yourself turning into a cat, really ask yourself why you think it’s happening. It might be a sign you need to work on some things.
