If someone got drunk, read the Wikipedia entry for “It Follows” and decided over the next morning’s hangover to write a screenplay, “The Bye Bye Man” might be the result. In reality, this horror film is based on a “strange-but-true” story by Robert Damon Schneck, but it lacks any of the terror or the details that cause the best ghost stories and urban legends to haunt us. I’ve been far more unnerved by Reddit posts than the 96 minutes here. This is about as scary — and exactly as goofy — as an episode of “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?” But while that Hanna-Barbera classic was in on the joke, this ridiculous horror film doesn’t know why we’re laughing.
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“The Bye Bye Man” begins promisingly, with a stylish prologue set in 1969. The glare of sunlight belies the horror we’re about to witness, as Larry (Leigh Whannell of “Saw” and “Insidious” fame) targets vintage-costumed victims with a shotgun, asking them who they told. But once we land in the present, the film refrains from any attempt at style, relying instead on cheap scares and bad CGI. Rilke-quoting, Joy-Division-T-shirt-wearing student Elliot (Douglas Smith) is excited to move off his Wisconsin college campus into a decrepit house that he’ll share with his girlfriend, Sasha (Cressida Bonas), and his best friend, John (Lucien Laviscount).
Elliot, Sasha and John begin noticing odd things in their home and beyond, all traced to a shadowy, robed figure called “The Bye Bye Man” (Doug Jones). He and his badly animated, skinless hound follow the trio as they discover that they aren’t the first to fall victim to the mysterious killer’s deadly delusions. Once you think or say his name, you’re his to hunt, causing people to kill those who’ve heard his name to stop it from spreading and then kill themselves.
Directed by Stacy Title and written by Jonathan Penner, “The Bye Bye Man” — both the story and the villain himself — is so thinly drawn that it feels like you’re being told only part of a tale by someone who can’t remember any relevant information. Trains are a recurring theme and a harbinger of the creepy villain, but we’re never told what the connection is. Why do coins mark that he’s near, other than that they make an unsettling sound when they hit the hardwood floors of the old home? Sometimes the mystery around a horror movie’s terror is part of the fun, but here, the lack of information feels lazy.
I appreciate the effort to make a PG-13 horror movie, given the young protagonists, but “The Bye Bye Man” doesn’t compensate with an effectively creepy mood or violence done offscreen that is likely worse in the audience’s minds anyway. Instead, the approach to violence is often bloodless. People take a shotgun bullet to the chest with no real evidence they’ve been hit, even as they’re dying on the floor. Whether it’s due to the small budget or concern for the rating, I’ve seen more blood in broadcast procedurals than in this ostensible horror film.
As the lead, Smith should be sympathetic, but he and his character merit a shrug at best. As with the Bye Bye Man, we aren’t given enough details about him to make us care, and Smith’s performance isn’t strong enough to compensate for the script. Early moments between Laviscount’s John and Smith hint at a childhood trauma for the latter and a bond between the two, but it’s never fully explored. As girlfriend Sasha, Bonas is at once bland and overly precise. She’s uninteresting, but each word she speaks feels too practiced, like a performance from a ’60s TV show. As the Bye Bye Man, Jones doesn’t get to employ as much of the celebrated physicality he has brought to past roles in “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and “Hellboy.” If he’d been able to do more, it might have made his character — and the movie as a whole — much scarier. Brief appearances from Carrie-Anne Moss and Faye Dunaway don’t help the film, but they serve as a nice distraction, mostly from asking, “Why is Faye Dunaway in this movie?”
“The Bye Bye Man” just skirts so-bad-it’s-good territory, unintentionally making the audience laugh more than they gasp. With its college-student characters, the film dallies with big ideas about how words and our thoughts impact reality, but like everything else, it remains largely unexplored. But delving into plot, character and philosophy might have taken more time, and 96 minutes was already far too long for this dull mess of a movie. [D]
