Mary Dauterman on Booger Film

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Mary Dauterman on Booger Film

Filmmaker Magazine

by Natalie Keogan

September 20, 2024

After the sudden death of her best friend and roommate Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin), Anna (Grace Glowicki) starts to act strange. At first, her odd behavior seems easily attributable to intense grief, but soon she begins to recognize physical abnormalities she can’t quite explain. Granted, she was bitten by her and Izzy’s fluffy, inky-black cat (the eponymous Booger) just before he fled via the fire escape. But Anna begins to suffer from far more than just cat-scratch fever and a gnarly hand wound: coarse, dark hairs begin to sprout, her movements become increasingly delicate yet uncanny, and could that actually be a hairball she’s hacking up? The guilt Anna feels from Booger’s recent escape could have triggered intense psychosomatic symptoms, but even her typically absent-minded boyfriend (Garrick Bernard) grows concerned. Izzy’s mother (Marcia DeBonis) is the only person Anna could possibly begin to relate to, but the 20-something’s newfound agoraphobia keeps her from nurturing this connection. The only real social interaction she benefits from is the rare run-in with another seemingly feral local woman (Heather Matarazzo). 

As in several previous shorts, writer-director Mary Dauterman seamlessly incorporates social media and iPhone videos intoBooger’s visual language. Anna obsessively looks at snippets from her and Izzy’s longtime friendship, burrowing into the bygone life that her phone allows her to cling to. While utilized with a less overt comedic tack, which has tended to be the filmmaker’s preferred territory in the past, it’s refreshing to watch digital screens on-screen that accurately reflect their digital texture and quotidian omnipresence. 

I recently met Dauterman at a cat cafe on the Lower East Side to discuss her body horror feature debut. Our resultant conversation touches on the director’s fascination with inept male characters, how she assembled the film’s cast as well as her own self-appointed status as a “crazy cat lady.” Frequent pauses and coos, resulting from friendly cats vying for our attention, have been cut from the final transcription. A tie-in mixtape featuring several musicians covering “The Piña Colada Song,” a recurring musical motif in the film, dropped on September 20. Booger screens at 6:45 pm tomorrow at Dear Friends Books in Brooklyn, preceded by a cat adoption event at 4:30. The film is currently available to stream on VOD. 

Filmmaker: Grace plays a much different character than you’ve previously explored. I know you reached out to her after seeing Tito, which she wrote and directed. As a fellow writer-director, how did her involvement shape the character of Anna? 

Dauterman: Working with Grace was amazing. When she got involved she was like, “Let’s just start Zooming weekly.” We talked a lot about her character’s motivation and I was really open to continuing working on the script. Grace is really funny and physical. We mostly had conversations about, “How did my character get here?” We were also just talking about our own experiences and how to pull those into specific scenes. I think Grace would say the hardest scenes for her were the crying scenes, but I think she did an amazing job.

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