With a tale of female friendship couched in a rhetoric of body horror, it may be argued that Mary Dauterman’s feature directorial debut, “Booger” (2024), exhibits only minimal relation to horror. The film seeks to evoke feelings of fear and disgust not through plots or characters but through certain generic elements and filmic moments. The plot is really straightforward: Anna, a young woman, slowly but steadily develops feral eccentricities following her friend’s untimely death.
At its core, “Booger” is not haunting but exploratory. Yearning for a reunion with his dead friend, Anna’s preoccupation with the memory of her dead friend, which finds its apogee in the missing cat, triumphs over her worldly obligations. The film hovers intriguingly between the exciting hypothesis of the cat’s disappearance and the possibility that it never disappeared. Yet even the confusion around the disappearance becomes a marker of the central character’s defiance in acknowledging the toll that the death has taken on her.
Booger (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
How does Booger go missing?
Best friends Anna and Izzy share an apartment where they are greeted by the sudden arrival of a black cat. The cat’s dirty, long black fur earns him the moniker ‘Booger.’ Izzy dies in a bike accident soon after. That leaves Anna behind to process her grief all by herself. Following Izzy’s passing, Anna is much less ambitious, with no plans for herself, and rarely ventures out beyond the domain of their apartment, spending all her time mooning over the videos of Izzy on her phone.
Soon, however, one more curveball hits Anna as the last emblem of their friendship, Booger, bolts out of the fire escape. Before escaping, Booger bites Anna and leaves her with a toothy puncture on her hand. Later, when Joyce, Izzy’s mother, notices the bloody wound, she puts a bandaid over it.
What happens in the aftermath of Izzy’s death and Booger’s disappearance?
On the one hand, when she is plastering the city walls with missing posters of Booger, she also acquires mannerisms akin to a feral being. She is distracted by bits of trash, hatching plans to attack a caged canary at a pet store and chewing away wisps of her hair. Once, while she is out with her boyfriend, Max, at a diner, she is debilitated by a bout of cough. When she coughs out tufts of black hair, Anna is forced to deal with the corporeal manifestation of the unprocessed grief and the morbid preoccupation with the cat. Hairs, too, start sprouting out of the punctures left by Booger.
As the loss exerts overbearing pressure, her unrelenting nightmares become symptomatic of her degrading mental state. In her nightmares, she curls up on an infinitely stretching expanse of black hair. When she wakes up, she finds herself drawn to scratching herself against the bark of a tree.
Will Anna remain in her state of misery forever?
At Izzy’s memorial service, Anna withdraws into the toilet and notices her canines have grown abnormally sharp. It is the first time since Izzy’s death that Anna breaks down. Joyce helps her calm down and gives her some of her homemade cookies to make her feel better. Moreover, Joyce broaches the idea that maybe they can help each other heal from their collective loss by being each other’s support system.
As Max tries to help Anna come to terms with her suppressed feelings, Anna is agitated by Max’s concern over her bottled-up grief and storms out of his apartment. She returns to her building only to find that her landlord has kicked her out with all her belongings. The call from work is equally harassing as her boss, who has never been understanding, fires her. In a horrifying turn of events, Anna disassociates herself from her surroundings as her feral soul overpowers her. She grabs a rat and eats it after biting off its head.
In a disheveled state, Anna reaches the bar at the corner of the street. In a drunken stupor, Anna believes she has spotted Izzy chitchatting with her friends at a corner of the bar. The next we know, her higher-up is also there, signaling her to replace the printer toner. Anna goes to a washroom and is horrified to find the pet store lady using a litter box. Anna watches her body morphing and mutating with her slowly protruding fingernails, discolored eyes, and overgrown hairs from her wound. Luckily, Max is in the same bar, and he catches hold of her as she tries to cross the road clumsily.
Booger (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
How does Booger show the corporeal manifestation of Anna’s grief?
As Anna cries about losing Booger and not finding him anywhere, Max reminds her that Booger has been missing for two years. In fact, after Booger bolted out of the window, the three–Anna, Izzy, and Max– went out searching for him. Anna leaves to find Booger again. Without explaining how she got to know about Booger’s location, the film then cuts to the pet store where Anna can be seen caressing a black cat, in all probability Booger. She opens Booger’s cage, and Booger runs away. Anna chases the cat and spots it returning to her apartment through the fire escape.
As she climbs up the fire escape, she finds herself in a surreal dreamscape again as we see her back on the hairy landscape looking for Booger. Anna, covered with long body hair, expels out a huge ball of hair from her mouth slathered in slimy bile. Her phone is inside the ball of hair, safely secured in the tight spool. Anna finds the video from the night when Booger went missing. The next morning Anna finds Booger in her apartment. She spraypaints Izzy’s bike and sets it as a memorial in the corner of the street. She makes that call to Joyce and tells her that she would gladly join her for dinner.
Ultimately, the film broaches a final statement on Anna as she comes out of her cushioned retreat and confronts her suppressed feelings. Almost as a visual metaphor for her internal healing, her band-aid falls off, and we see that the bite wound has begun to heal, too. She sings in the shower for the first time (another emblem of their friendship, the Escape (Piña Colada Song)) as we see her, marking her emancipation from her disintegrating condition.
