Booger is a movie about grief, transformation, and…hairballs. It’s also, unfortunately, a movie that feels like someone dared themselves to stretch a five-minute weird short into 90 minutes and then never backed down. It has a concept, vibes, and commitment. What it does not have is enough story to justify the amount of time you spend watching a human slowly become a cat while you slowly become regret.
Mary Dauterman’s feature debut is a body horror comedy about loss, codependency, and feline possession, filtered through the most aggressively “quirky indie” energy you can imagine. It’s the kind of film that looks you straight in the eye and says, “Isn’t this so offbeat?” while you politely wonder if you can chew your own arm off to escape.
Girl Meets Cat, Cat Bites Girl, Audience Suffers
Our protagonist, Anna (Grace Glowicki), is grieving the sudden death of her best friend and roommate Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin, appearing mostly in memories and emotional shrapnel). Their cat, Booger, runs away. When the cat reappears and bites Anna, she begins to undergo a bizarre bodily transformation.
That sounds cool, right? Grief as infection. Loss as mutation. A woman literally becoming the feral, evasive creature she clings to as her last living connection to her dead friend. There’s something there.
The problem is, the movie knows there’s something there too—and it will not stop nudging you about it.
Anna’s transformation plays out in stages: little behavioral tics, odd cravings, physical changes. Great fuel for body horror. But instead of escalating terror or tension, we get long stretches of awkward, drawn-out scenes where not much happens beyond “Anna is acting weird again” while everyone around her reacts with the baffled energy of people trapped in an improv scene they can’t end.
There’s a version of this that’s raw and sharp and devastating. This is not that version. This is the version where the horror is frequently smothered by tonal confusion and “lol random” beats.
Grief, but Quirky
Booger wants to say something about grief, specifically about the kind that smothers you, isolates you, and makes you cling to the wrong things in the wrong ways. Anna’s entire life was wrapped around Izzy, and now that Izzy is gone, she’s stuck trying to become something else—but instead, she becomes… a cat.
Symbolically, sure: she retreats, becomes more animal, more instinctual, less verbal, more detached. Emotionally, also sure: cats are needy and withholding at the same time. Psychologically, okay, we get it: grief makes you unrecognizable to yourself and others.
The problem is that the film keeps hammering those ideas without giving Anna enough depth as a person before the transformation. We’re told she’s close to Izzy. We see she’s devastated by Izzy’s death. But beyond “sad, isolated, weird,” Anna doesn’t have a particularly rich inner life on screen. So when she starts licking herself, snarling, and generally going full feral, it plays less like a tragic descent and more like, “Ah, she’s become even more of what she already was: an awkward chaos goblin with worse hygiene.”
It’s hard to feel truly heartbroken for someone when the movie mostly uses them as a vehicle for a concept.
Comedy, Horror, and a Tonal Collision
Booger bills itself as a body horror comedy, which is always a balancing act. Done right, you get something like Jennifer’s Body or Nina Forever—savage, dark, and emotionally resonant. Done wrong, you get mood whiplash and jokes that undercut every potential scare.
Booger leans hard into cringe-based humor: surreal social interactions, uncomfortable silences, people saying slightly off, weird things while you’re supposed to laugh at the awkwardness. That style can work… if it’s not constantly stepping on the throat of the horror.
Here, the comedy often feels like it’s sabotaging tension rather than playing with it. Just when things could get unsettling, we get a quirky aside, a goofy reaction, or a scene that feels like it was workshopped at an alt-comedy night. The body horror is rarely allowed to fully commit to being genuinely disturbing; it’s always accompanied by a wink, a shrug, or a “wow, that’s weird, huh?”
It’s like the movie is terrified of you taking it too seriously, so it keeps throwing in little smirks. Unfortunately, that’s also how you end up with neither effective horror nor satisfying comedy—just a tepid mush of “I get what you were going for.”
Performance Trapped in a Concept
Grace Glowicki is all in on this role, and honestly, she deserved a better movie around her. She contorts her body, her voice, her mannerisms, slowly leaning into the animalistic turn with full commitment. You can see the work. You can see the risk. You can also see the script abandoning her halfway through and just letting her carry entire scenes through sheer weirdness.
Her Anna doesn’t get enough grounded, human moments to counterbalance the absurdity. When she’s not in full cat-mode, she’s usually drifting around in a daze, snapping at people, or awkwardly sabotaging her relationships. There’s sadness there, but it’s flattened.
The supporting characters—Max (Garrick Bernard), Ellen (Heather Matarazzo), and Joyce (Marcia DeBonis)—mostly exist as confused satellites revolving around Anna. They react, they worry, they deliver the occasional punchline. But they never fully register as real people with their own arcs. They’re more like comedic props being slowly alienated by Anna’s behavior.
It’s a shame, because with this cast, the film could’ve done a lot more emotionally. Instead, it mostly uses them as mirrors to reflect how weird Anna is becoming, and then moves on.
Body Horror Lite
For a body horror film, Booger is surprisingly…mild. Yes, Anna transforms. Yes, things get gross-ish. But the movie seems oddly squeamish about really going for it.
We get hints and touches: maybe some teeth, some fur, some feral movement. The implication is there, but it rarely escalates to genuine nightmare fuel. The imagery feels half-committed, as if the film wants credit for being body horror without fully traumatizing anybody.
And look, not every horror film has to be a grotesque splatterfest. But if you’re going to center your story on a woman morphing into a cat-like creature as a metaphor for grief and psychological breakdown, maybe let things really unravel. The more contained everything stays, the more it feels like we’re watching a concept reel instead of a descent.
By the time Anna is fully in her cat-headed grief spiral, you’re not screaming. You’re mostly shrugging, like, “Yeah, that tracks.”
Indie Quirk Fatigue
Booger also suffers from a terminal case of indie quirk fatigue. You know the vibe: the off-kilter pacing, the deliberately mundane production design, the “real” awkwardness in social interactions, the faint but constant hum of “we’re different from mainstream horror.”
That can be charming. Here, it often feels like a shield, protecting the film from the hard work of structure and escalation. You can practically hear the subtext whispering, “If this feels aimless, it’s because we’re authentic.” No, sometimes it just feels aimless.
Scenes start, dangle, and end without building much of anything. The movie gestures at emotional catharsis but never really lands one. It gestures at insanity without fully mapping it. It gestures at horror without sinking its claws in.
It’s all gesture. Very little follow-through.
Final Diagnosis: Booger Sticks, But Not in a Good Way
Booger wants to be a bold, funny, heartbreaking little gem about grief and transformation through a body horror lens. Instead, it’s a shaggy, uneven, undercooked film with a great central performance trapped inside a script that doesn’t quite know what to do beyond “isn’t this strange?”
You get:
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A strong, committed lead performance from Grace Glowicki
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A clever premise that mostly stays clever in theory, not execution
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Some small, sharp moments of absurdity and discomfort
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A lot of meandering, tonal wobble, and underwhelming horror
If you are deeply into grief-as-genre, cat symbolism, and offbeat indie horror that prioritizes mood and quirk over scares and structure, you might find Booger interesting as an experiment.
If you came for “body horror comedy” and expected either body horror or comedy in reliable doses, you’re more likely to walk away feeling like the movie coughed itself up, stared at you for 90 minutes, and then sauntered off without cleaning anything up.
In the end, Booger doesn’t quite transform into the film it wants to be. It just kind of hangs there—uncomfortable, sticky, and very hard to ignore, but not exactly something you’re glad you spent this much time examining.
