“The Boogeyman” did not scare or impress me much. I must confess that I was often afraid of sleeping in my dark bedroom at night when I was a little young boy, but the movie failed to touch upon my childhood fear and dread during that time, and I was mildly entertained from time to time by several fairly good moments without much care or attention to its predictable plot and superficial characters.

The story mainly revolves around a psychiatrist named Will Harper (Chris Messina) and his two daughters Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair). He recently lost his dear wife due to an unfortunate accident, and both he and his daughters are still coping with her death. While he tries to do his best for comforting and supporting his daughters, there is still some emotional distance between him and them, and that is particularly evident from Sadie, who has to deal with how she often draws the attention of everyone at her high school due to her mother’s death.

On one day, Will is suddenly approached by one very disturbed man who clearly needs some help. Because this guy desperately insists that he must have a conversation with Will, Will reluctantly agrees to listen to him for a while, and the guy tells him about an unbelievable story about how he lost all of his three kids to some scary mysterious entity. Naturally, Will becomes more worried, so he decides to do what anyone would do under his situation, but, alas, that leads to another traumatic experience for his daughters as well as him.

On the surface, the guy seemed to be actually responsible for the death of his three kids, but, of course, the mood soon becomes ominous inside Will’s house as days go by. When Sawyer tells Will and Sadie about something scary lurking behind the closet door of her bedroom, they do not believe her much because they think she is simply afraid of darkness, but then Sadie also begins to sense something around inside their house. At first, it is just a dark stain on the ceiling of her bedroom, but more ominous incidents happen not long after that, and Sadie becomes more convinced that something is really menacing her family, especially after she sneaks into her father’s office and then checks the recording of his conversation with that ill-fated man.

Around that narrative point, we are supposed to brace ourselves more, but the movie shows its bag of tricks too early in my humble opinion. Even before the end of its first act, the movie reveals that its titular entity is real (Is this a spoiler?), so there is not much intrigue or suspense no matter how much it attempts to scare us in one way or another. When the titular entity is fully revealed at last, the movie comes to lose more tension as this entity does not look as spooky or interesting as when it often lurks in darkness, and that is another major letdown of the movie.

In addition, the movie is also deficient in terms of story and characters. Will and his daughters’ ongoing emotional struggles with his wife’s death are a merely story setup without generating much human depth, and the same thing can be said about a subplot involved with one of Sadie’s schoolmates. It seems at first that this subplot is becoming crucial as Sadie gets some help from this character later in the story, but then the movie quickly discards this subplot in the end without much afterthought.

Anyway, the movie is not boring at least as director Rob Savage and his crew members including cinematographer Eli Born occasionally provide some effective moments of terror to be appreciated. I liked a creepy scene associated with a little trial by the psychiatrist of Will’s two daughters, and I also enjoyed when Saide enters the nearly abandoned house of someone who may provide the information about what has been menacing her and her family. There are so many candles in the house that I wondered how many candles that character actually bought – and how much time it took for that character to install all those candles here and there inside the house.

I appreciate the diligent efforts of its main cast members for making their characters as convincing as possible, though some of them are under-utilized at times. Sophie Thatcher, who has been mainly known for TV drama series “Yellowjackets”, and Vivien Lyra Blair, whom you may recognize for her substantial supporting turn in TV drama series “Obi-Wan Kenobi”, gradually become as the center of the story, but Chris Messina is sadly stuck with his thankless role without many things to do, and that is another disappointment in the film. In case of David Dastmalchian, he looks suitably alarming during his brief appearance, and LisaGay Hamilton provides a little warmth to the story despite her merely functional supporting character.

On the whole, “The Boogeyman”, which is based on the short story of the same name by Stephen King, is not wholly without engaging qualities, but it still feels subpar even compared to the recent mid-level movie adaptations of King’s horror works such as “It” (2017) or “Gerald’s Game” (2017). To be frank with you, that boogeyman character in classic animation film “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993) is more memorably evil, scary, and, above all, entertaining, and maybe you should watch it instead for your cold autumn night.