Bye bye to a good review
The Bye Bye Man Running time: 1hr 36min Starring: Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, Cressida Bonas, Michael Trucco, Doug Jones, Carrie-Anne Moss, Faye Dunaway, Director: Stacy Title
LAUNCHING a new horror franchise is almost always a heavy lift, but several memorable properties have been successfully introduced over the past few years and so far show little sign of fading, including the Insidious, Purge and Conjuring/Annabelle series. The Bye Bye Man apparently seeks to join this group.
Stacy Title helms this amalgam of haunted house, demon possession and psychological horror elements, which is often involving, although not quite entirely satisfying.
An opening sequence set in 1969 Wisconsin depicts crazed local journalist Larry Redmon embarking on a shotgun shooting rampage, murdering eight neighbours before killing himself. Cutting to the present day, college students Elliot (Douglas Smith) and John (Lucien Laviscount) prepare to relocate off campus after signing a lease on a large single-family home, along with Elliot’s girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas). They quickly discover that the decrepit house is more in need of renovation than redecoration, but with some old furniture hauled up from the basement they soon make it habitable, despite the home’s frequent squeaks and creaks.
Soon after moving in, Elliot finds some mysterious inscriptions inside the bedside table he shares with Sasha. Handwritten words reading “Don’t think it, don’t say it” are repeatedly scrawled on the bottom of the drawer and when Elliot removes it, he finds the phrase “The Bye Bye Man” carved into the table. After a raucous housewarming party, Sasha’s friend Kim (Jenna Kanell) helps them hold a seance in an attempt to psychically cleanse the house. She quickly calls it off when she detects a malevolent presence, saying “something is coming,” and Elliot suddenly realises that she must be referring to The Bye Bye Man.
Although the script is adapted from Robert Damon Schneck’s short story The Bridge to Body Island, it lacks any distinctive origin story or internal mythology akin to the devil-worshiping of the Paranormal Activity series or the nether-realm of Insidious.
From a plotting perspective, the film succeeds in laying out a plausible progression of events that rapidly envelops the bewildered characters, particularly the logical and methodical Elliot. Smith charts Elliot’s burgeoning paranoia and fear with increasingly debilitated responses to the intrusions of The Bye Bye Man, struggling to maintain a grip on his sanity and protect his friends and family members.
The pic deploys a fairly effective range of horror techniques, including jump scares, misdirection and some oddly unattractive VFX to ratchet up the tension, although gore is at a minimum. Cinematographer James Kniest’s fluid Steadicam and forced perspective shots casually nod to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining without being derivative.
The Bye Bye Man wouldn’t be a franchise aspirant without hinting at the possibility of a sequel, or perhaps more than one, depending on interpretations concerning the film’s intentionally ambiguous conclusion.
– Hollywood Reporter