Movie Review: The Bye Bye Man (2017)
The Bye Bye Man is a truly awful movie. You’ll find yourself laughing a lot, and asking yourself questions even more often.
The movie opens in a suburban neighborhood in 1969 in Madison, Wisconsin, where some guy goes around killing a bunch of people with a shotgun. It’s all done in one shot, but it’s not done well. There’s no real reason to make this a one-shot thing; it doesn’t add any kind of tension. It’s just a bad scene. It’s a bright, sunny day, which maybe the filmmakers wanted to use in contrast to the killings on-screen, but that doesn’t really work. I could see this scene being at least midly effective if it took place at night, or it was foggy, or something.
In modern day, Elliot (Douglas Smith), his girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas), and John (Lucien Laviscount) all move into a house that they had apparently never seen before. They’re all college students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (they never say the name and it’s not filmed there, but there is a Badgers pennant in somebody’s bedroom, so I think that’s safe to say).
Some weird things happen, and Elliot finds a drawer with the words “don’t think it don’t say it,” and the name “Bye Bye Man” scratched into it. There’s a scene with like a medium or something, and the name comes up.
Very little of this movie makes sense. The backstory that we get of the Bye Bye Man (Doug Jones, The Shape of Water) doesn’t tell us enough. Coins and trains are things associated with him, but we have no idea why.
Elliot and John both have some hallucinations, and in a truly awful scene, so does the medium character. She gets out of the car when she’s with Elliot, and she starts running for some reason, across train tracks when an actual train approaches. I guess her hallucination was there wasn’t a train, maybe. But then when she gets killed, it’s edited in a way that shows her clearly standing still on the train tracks when a train hits her, so the movie implies that it was Elliot’s hallucination that she was running, which really doesn’t make any sense.
There’s a scene where Elliot goes to the library to learn about the Bye Bye Man, and in a silly moment, Miss Watkins, the librarian, takes an active interest in his research. He finds that there was a case in 1969 in which the Bye Bye Man I guess made someone kill someone, and the journalist who wrote about this later killed everyone who knew about it. He’s the guy from the opening scene. Later, Faye Dunaway, who plays the journalist’s widow, explains that you need to kill everyone who knows the name, because otherwise he will kill them.
Later, John starts freaking out in their home, when he hallucinates the woman that was hit by the train. He grabs some scissors. The scene is shot from his perspective and I don’t mean that like we’re literally seeing his point of view, but it’s clear this is his hallucination. We don’t see Sasha’s hallucination, even though I guess she thinks she sees Elliot. So when Elliot rushes in and sees John repeatedly stabbing Sasha with the scissors, he tackles him and ends up shooting him, only for the movie to reveal that he had actually shot Sasha.
So, Elliot’s Bye-Bye Man hallucination is that he sees John stabbing Sasha when it was really the other way around, I guess. That’d be a decent little twist if it made any sense. Unfortunately, the film showed us John’s hallucination and implied Sasha’s, even though it all played out to be Elliot’s. But Elliot wasn’t there, so why did we essentially see what Elliot would have seen had he been there? If Sasha thought John were Elliot, why would she have been stabbing him repeatedly? And I guess John’s hallucination didn’t pay off in any way. It’s just thrown in there to have a twist for the sake of having a twist; it makes no sense. The whole hallucination thing really throws logic out the window.
There’s an attempt to have an emotional core of the movie with Elliot’s brother, Virgil (Michael Trucco, Hush), and his young daughter, Elliot’s niece. It doesn’t work. So little of this movie does work.
The movie is a transparent attempt to create a cultural icon out of its villain. There’s a little bit of Freddy Krueger there, and an awful lot of Slenderman. But the rules aren’t established in a way that makes any sense, and there’s no logic to the imagery associated with him.
The movie has a lot of false scares, which is irritating, though not as irritating as the performances. No one is good in this movie, and it’s a shame they got some quality actors in there in Faye Dunaway and Carrie-Anne Moss. The main three characters are very bad, with Cressida Bonas standing out in particular as being awful. It’s very obvious she’s British; she in no way keeps a consistent American accent.
There’s also very little payoff to this movie. When you actually see the Bye Bye Man, nothing really comes of it, making this movie incredibly anti-climactic. There’s just so little this movie has to offer.
Rating: 1/10
