In Review: 'Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,' 'The Boogeyman'

The animated Spider-Verse expands its web without losing any threads while a '70s Stephen King story gets a very 2023 adaptation.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Dirs. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson
140 min.

When it arrived in 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was about as big of a dare as a big-budget studio blockbuster could be. An animated superhero adventure that had to compete with an abundance of live-action competitors — including movies featuring Spider-Man — Into sported an animation style all its own, one that required viewers to keep up with visuals that owed more to the comic book page than photorealism. What’s more, it didn’t offer the Spider-Man most were used to. Sure, Peter Parker was there (two of them, even), but so was a spider-powered Gwen Stacy from another dimension and, as a focal character, Miles Morales, the teenage son of a Black father and a Puerto Rican mother who’d been introduced to comics readers less than a decade before the film’s release. The bet paid off, however. Into the Spider-Verse was a creative and commercial triumph on a scale that demanded a sequel. And surely one that repeated what had come before would be good enough, right?

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has other ideas. The opening shot of a troubled Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) saying “Let’s do things differently” against a skittering drumbeat feels like a statement of purpose and the film that follows makes good on it. Across goes bigger than its predecessor without losing the emotional depth that defined it as much as its unique look. It’s more ambitious, too, offering a plethora of Spider-Mans and visiting a handful of their universes (some of which, like much of the plot, are best left unspoiled) while keeping Gwen, Miles (Shameik Moore) and (eventually) Peter (Jake Johnson). Like the ever-shifting animation of the film, it can be a bit dizzying, but that’s by design.

Opening not long after the events of Into, Across finds Miles struggling to find a balance between the demands of everyday teen life and his sideline as a superhero. He’s mostly making it work, but the arrival of a self-declared nemesis called The Spot (Jason Schwartzman) threatens the fragile peace he’s achieved, even if he doesn’t seem that threatening at first. A klutz with the fumbling ability to make and travel through holes, The Spot’s a reluctant and less-than-formidable-seeming villain. But he’s able to exploit holes in the multiverse, which makes him a threat to Spider-Mans far and wide.

These include Gwen, who finds herself inexplicably fighting a variation on the Spider-Man villain the Vulture, who has seemingly stepped out of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s designs for a flying machine. That threat, and brewing drama with her police captain father (Shea Whigham), helps draw her into an organization designed with keeping the Spider-Verse in order, one headed by Miguel O’Hara, a.k.a. Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Isaac), a pragmatist focused on the greater good, even if that requires some suffering on the part of others. Her attempts to keep order eventually reunite her with Miles, but the reunion seemingly only deepens the Spider-Verse’s troubles.

Working from a script by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and David Callahan, new directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson keep the action brisk, and the quips and in-jokes flying while still capturing a sense of mounting dread on both the personal and cosmic scale. The labyrinthine plot includes appearances from a pregnant Spider-Woman (Issa Rae), the Indian Spider-Man Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni), and the anarchic Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya), but Gwen and Miles’ family struggles are given just as much prominence as a potential tear in reality, even before all the crises start to come together in a kind of multiversal trolley problem.

That classic unresolvable philosophical thought experiment does not get resolved here. In fact, not much does. In some respects, any assessment of Across the Spider-Verse is provisional. Its finale ending doesn’t just present unresolved plot strands, it’s as cliffhanger-y as a Melrose Place season finale. Even at 140 minutes, Across is really only half a movie that won’t be completed until the arrival of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse next year. If it’s as gripping and involving as this one, however, it can’t arrive soon enough. —Keith Phipps

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse opens across the movie theater-verse tonight.

The Boogeyman 
Dir. Rob Savage
99 min.

Horror is a trend-driven genre. A few movies have the inspiration to set the trends, then an avalanche of cash-ins follow, scrambling to come up with a reasonable facsimile of whatever seems to be capturing the zeitgeist. It’s an interesting thought exercise to consider what the Stephen King short story “The Boogeyman”—first published in Cavalier magazine in 1973 and later included in his 1978 anthology Night Shift—might have looked like if it were made in different eras. It could have been a slasher movie. It could have been J-horror. And with a little bit of tweaking, it could have even been a found-footage Camcorder experience. The elasticity of the conceit is right there in the title: So long as there are open closets, there’s a Boogeyman for all seasons. 

Directed by Rob Savage (Host, Dashcam), whose surname alone takes him out of the running for future E.M. Forster adaptations, The Boogeyman owes much to the domestic storybook chills of The Babadook and the rules that dictate It Follows, with a relentless supernatural force that can get passed along like a virus. It’s also about trauma and grief, two more flavor-of-the-month themes that keep on “elevating” horror films that aspire to ever-so-slightly more than common trash. The obvious problem that leaves for a film like The Boogeyman, which is already too slim a premise for a full-length feature, is what, exactly, makes it stand out from the others of its kind. The answer? Absolutely nothing. 

The film opens with the Harper family at a place of maximum vulnerability, with two sisters still reeling from the sudden loss of their mother and their father trying too hard to force all of them to persevere. As outcast Sadie sulks back to high school and her wildly insensitive peers, her father Will (Chris Messina), a therapist, gets a disturbing visit from a new patient (David Dastmalchian) who talks about his own tragic family losses while attempting to describe the terrifying entity he holds responsible. Later that evening, Will’s youngest daughter Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair), already afraid of the dark, asks her dad to check under the bed and close the closet door before she goes to sleep. After he leaves, the door opens. 

The idea of a monster in the closet is as basic as it gets—whether it’s classically rendered or utterly generic is entirely up to the execution. To that end, Savage is a skilled enough craftsman to bring the modest scares of The Boogeyman across, but other than Dastmalchian’s one-scene wonder as a man hollowed out by sadness and fear, there’s little here that sticks to the ribs. (That King’s short story is about the patient, not Dr. Harper, says a lot.) The spindly, creepy-crawly monster that skitters in the shadows, teasing its prey before pouncing on it, feels Xeroxed from countless other creature designs and the grief theme is an attempt at emotional ballast that’s largely unearned. It will be forgotten the next time something goes bump in the night. — Scott Tobias

The Boogeyman creeps into theaters tonight.