Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman is scary and good, but not scary good

Six years after the Stephen King adaptation industrial complex rumbled up to fifth gear with 2017's box office wonder It — and with it, a studio-led rush to mine every corner of the horror novelist's literary output, dollar babies be damned — an adaptation of his 1973 short story The Boogeyman, later published in the collection Night Shift, has hit theatres.

The original 18-page bloodcurdler centres on a man named Lester Billings who visits a psychiatrist after his children are murdered by a malevolent creature. In the updated script by A Quiet Place screenwriting duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, Billings's story is mostly used as a springboard for a film that instead focuses on the psychiatrist and his two daughters.

When we meet Sadie (Sophie Thatcher of Yellowjackets fame) and her younger sister, Sawyer (Bird Box's Vivien Lyra Blair), they're a month on the other side of their mother's death. Sadie — dark, depressed, lonely — can barely make it through a day at school, while Sawyer can't sleep with the lights out. Their father, Will (Air's Chris Messina), has returned to his psychiatry practice, helping patients process their own traumas — though we get the sense that he's ignoring his own.

When Billings (Dune's David Dastmalchian) arrives at their home — dishevelled and creepy, but begging to speak with someone — it's clear that we're looking at two people at different junctures of grief: One is a man deranged by it, the other a man intent on burying it. Describing the shadow monster that killed his children, Billings calls it "the thing that comes for your kids when you're not paying attention."

From that scene onward, King's job is done, and while his thematic beats are competently realized in a well-crafted 98-minute flick, The Boogeyman suffers most when it strays too far from its central family.

The monster in question is family: It's a living manifestation of Will's festering, unaddressed loss, which he never talks about (as charged by Sadie). She and her sister are largely left to fend for themselves during the nightly terror scenes that begin after Billings's visit to their dad's office — scenes from which their dad is conspicuously absent.

Sophie Thatcher — who between The Boogeyman and Yellowjackets seems primed for scream-queen status — is a brooding performer who expertly juggles Sadie's sleep-deprived desperation with the burden of raising her younger sister through an emotional nightmare.

She keeps the film anchored, a final girl as game as I've ever seen — I just wish she'd had a more lively sparring partner in Messina, who puts up his character's facade without ever showing us its jagged cracks.

Sophie and Sawyer have lost their mom, yes, but they're also losing their dad — and something unspeakable has bubbled up from that void. A creepy, stomach-churning monster with long, skeletal limbs, Savage and his collaborators are most successful in their jump scare ambitions when the creature's presence is only implied by sound.

The Boogeyman's weaknesses primarily stem from the challenges of building a 98-minute feature film off the back of an 18-page short story. Lester Billings's creepy, forlorn wife arrives just at the halfway point to bog down the whole thing with unnecessary exposition, explaining the monster's origins and intentions to Sadie.

The character's first offence is that she doesn't say anything we hadn't already gleaned in more exciting ways from the first 45 minutes of the movie. But later, the same woman returns for an overly manufactured, Rube Goldberg machine-esque set piece scene that — for all of its octane — really just feels like a lengthy distraction, killing minutes during a movie with an already slim runtime.

A misguided subplot involving Sadie's group of frenemies — particularly one whose venom toward our heroine feels neither truthful nor necessary — seems like a wasted opportunity. There are more subtle means to show that young people are often ill-equipped to handle loss, never mind a loss that isn't their own, but the idea is instead squandered on a lazy depiction of teen girls.

Still, I loved the way Savage stylishly crafts those childhood nightmares, framing characters by doors left ajar and in claustrophobic crawl spaces, or in therapists' offices with a blinking red light meant to train Sawyer away from her phobias (hint: it doesn't). There's a brief but wonderfully edited shot sequence that begins with Sadie slamming the door in her sister's face and ends with her waking up with the cold sweats — and I won't tell you what happens in the middle.

Having left the theatre several days ago now, the thing I'm craving most is an indelible line or cinematic image that creeps back into my mind as I'm trying to fall asleep, chilling me into alertness. The Boogeyman isn't quite so memorable as that — and it certainly doesn't reinvent the genre — but none of those things precluded me from having a good, scary time at the theatre, as any decent popcorn horror should.