Big Hollywood films are often empowerment fantasies because big Hollywood films have everything you need for an empowerment fantasy. Massive budgets, incredible special effects, stunningly beautiful people—whether the genre is superhero, spy, sport underdog, romcom, or sweeping melodramas, there’s nothing like a big-screen picture with a huge budget to give you a sense of life lived large.
A lot of experiences in life, though, aren’t especially large or empowering. And when you’re trying to talk about, or imagine, disempowerment, the big-budget Hollywood experience doesn’t always work well. Instead, as Mary Dauterman demonstrates in her directorial debut Booger, if you want to explore the experience of grief, sadness, and feeling small, a limited budget is often a boon.
Booger is about two twentysomething Brooklyn best friends and roommates, Anna (Grace Glowicki) and Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin). After Izzy dies in a bicycling accident, Anna is scratched by their cat, Booger. Booger escapes, and Anna’s wound starts to fester—and worse than fester. She takes on catlike characteristics; she sucks on her hair, coughs up hairballs, gets distracted by fish in an aquarium, and eats a range of unsavory things. That sounds like a body horror film in the tradition of Cronenberg’s The Fly or An American Werewolf In London. And there are some parallels. But Booger’s microbudget doesn’t allow for a lot of stunning effects; a long hair where there shouldn’t be a hair is about as much as Dauterman can spring for.
As a result, the director has to build suspense by turning up the soundtrack, so it seems to be stalking Anna across the screen, or by zooming in on Glowicki’s eyes as they leak, or her mouth as she eats. The horror isn’t that strange things are happening to Anna’s body; it’s more that she, like Izzy, has a body that’s betraying her in completely unremarkable ways.
That’s not a criticism. On the contrary, the fact that the genre trappings never really get off the ground and into the cat tree is the point. The movie’s only 78 minutes, but some sequences—Anna carrying a bicycle up to her apartment while we hear her boss and friends leaving nagging messages on her machine; a miserable drunken flirtation with some guy she picks up at a bar—drag out in a nightmare of mundanity. The horror movie arc sputters and sighs and crawls back into a corner.
In some sense, Anna’s dream of turning into a cat is a metaphor for the way grief turns you into a hurt, scared animal, all instinct and vulnerability and fear. But the less-than-convincing effects, and the fact that Anna is obviously falling apart even without hacking up hairballs, suggests that the were-cat fantasy is a fantasy.
Anna’s using Booger’s disappearance, and her own Booger-ification, as a way to think about something, or anything, other than her loss. Licking the cat food tin is disgusting, but at least it’s unusual. It makes Izzy’s death is important, like it’s broken the world. The alternative is paying the bills, going into work, singing karaoke with boyfriend Max (Garrick Bernard), answering the phone when Izzy’s mother (Marcia DeBonis) calls.
In a film about the misery of nothing special happening, Glowicki is an excellent choice for the lead. She’s attractive by normal standards, but not Hollywood blockbuster stunning. She’s just a person up there on screen, not really turning into a cat, filled with self-loathing and grief, as is the way with most of us not particularly empowered people with our cats, trying not to think about death. Anna looks like a person you might know, and most of the narrative beats are familiar too. Again, that’s not a weakness; grief is grief, and there’s little point in trying to turn it into something else. Booger, like the cat it’s named after, is a tiny creature. It gets you in close and sinks its teeth in.
—Booger is out on VOD on September 13.