THE BYE BYE MAN is a dumb horror movie—let’s just get that out of the way right now. It’s not particularly scary either, which also makes it an especially bad horror movie. If that’s all you need to know, feel free to move on to something else while I continue doing my job. But honestly, in this resurgence of smart, original, character-driven scare films—almost too numerous to mention—you sometimes forget that there are still filmmakers and distributors putting out junk as well, most of which never even makes it onto theater screens.
In addition to being dumb and not scary, THE BYE BYE MAN is also reductive. You can actually feel director Stacy Title (THE LAST SUPPER, HOOD OF HORROR) and screenwriter Jonathan Penner (working from the short story “The Bridge to Body Island” by Robert Damon Schneck) dumbing down the plot and doing everything in their power to plow through this leaden, nonsensical plot to get to the film’s one worthy aspect—Guillermo del Toro favorite Doug Jones’s portrayal as the boogeyman-lite title character, and even those fleeting moments are undercut by the presence of a CG hellhound of some sort who slinks around BBM’s feet and that’s about it.
The film opens with its best moment, and the reason that it’s the best moment is that it reminds us of better, recent films—IT FOLLOWS being the most obvious. The setting is 1969 Madison, Wisconsin (because where else would the root of all evil stem from?), and a man is racing through his neighborhood mumbling “Don’t Say It, Don’t Think It” while attempting to find out which of his friendly neighbors knows the story about a mysterious figure in the vicinity, and if they told anybody else about it. If they confess that they did, he shoots them dead and eventually then takes his own life, in what was clearly a protective measure and not because he’s simply a crazy killer.
Jump ahead to the present, when three college students rent a house to share as off-campus housing. Elliot (Douglas Smith) is the ringleader, and he’s moving in with his oldest friend John (Lucien Laviscount) and girlfriend Sasha (newcomer Cressida Bonas), so what could possibly go wrong? If I’ve figured out the rules correctly, if you so much as speak the Bye Bye Man’s name once, he’ll hear it from wherever he is and come to you to do…well, this is where it gets tricky.
From what I could see, he doesn’t kill you outright. He infects your brain, makes you see things that aren’t there, and not see things that are right in front of you. He seems to play off your fears, and eventually you kill an imaginary threat (who turns out to be someone else who has heard the Bye Bye Man’s name) or perhaps you’ll kill yourself to keep you from infecting other people with his name. I guess my point is, after a while you stop being scared of the admittedly creepy-looking Bye Bye Man because he’s not the real danger. And as experience has proven, nothing is more effective in horror films that NOT being afraid of your central monster.
But if director Title had even bothered to make her film atmospheric, pleasant to look at, or eerie in a unique way, I might have given it points for trying. Instead what we get is typical spook-house production design that adds nothing to the film’s ambiance or scares. Also, please explain this to me: we have three college-educated, presumably smart adults who figure out what’s going on fairly quickly, yet every time they are confronted with a vision that clearly couldn’t be real, or at least should be the subject of some degree of skepticism, they go full stupid and believe everything put before them.
I tend not to go after specific performers in terms of their talent, but I’m compelled to single out Bonas, because she’s a terrible actor. Not to imply that Smith or Laviscount leave her in the dust in terms of her performance, but she has a handful of cringe-worthy, achingly bad scenes in which she’s clearly attempting to emote outside of her skill capabilities, and by the end, the audience I saw the film with was howling with laughter every time she spoke. And that before head-scratching cameos by the likes of Faye Dunaway and Carrie-Anne Moss occur. THE BYE BYE MAN is weird for so many reasons, none of which enhance the terror.
THE BYE BYE MAN is an endurance test. I left it feeling exhausted and vexed, frustrated that I lost track so early of all of the missed opportunities to do something original and exciting. Instead, the film is underwritten, overplayed, illogical, while grossly misjudging what it takes to scare people. Allow me to introduce to you the first truly terrible horror movie of 2017. And now that we’ve cleared our throats of this ball of phlegm, let’s move on to something more worthy of our attention.
