‘The Bye Bye Man’ Review: Fear Takes a Hike In Overwrought Teen Flick
A queasy prologue, though, hints at a promisingly gnarly time, with a calm, sunny 1969 afternoon in a suburb of Madison, Wisc., broken by the appearance of a nervy, bespectacled man (played by Leigh Whannell, the writer behind the “Saw” and “Insidious” franchises) with a rifle, ranting and dead set on killing friends and family members.
Though this is the PG-13 version of a horrifically brutal situation, it’s enough to prime your terror sensors for whatever supernatural awfulness is going to happen to the present-day college kids we’re introduced to immediately afterward: kind-faced Elliot (Douglas Smith, “Miss Sloane”), his fair-haired, soft-spoken girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas), and their friendly, party-hearty bud John (Lucien Laviscount, “Scream Queens”).
Handwritten on the drawer lining in a circle are the words “don’t say it, don’t think it,” over and over — which, of course, one of them says aloud — and scrawled on the underside is the movie title, which, when spoken during a jokey “séance” with a goth-y self-proclaimed psychic named Kim (Jenna Kanell), causes the lights to go out and one of them to collapse.
There’s the clichéd library excursion, the old newspaper story with clues, skeptical law enforcement (in the form of Carrie Anne Moss), and a visit to a figure from the past, in this case a Bye Bye Man survivor played by Faye Dunaway, who gets to stand on a stairwell and regally bellow “Leave!” but not much else.
What’s been slowly murdering the tension, you realize as “The Bye Bye Man” enters its hopped-up home stretch, is the repetitiveness of the dialogue (by screenwriter Jonathan Penner, adapting a story by Robert Damon Schneck), which devolves into Elliot carrying on a running tour-guide monologue about who the Bye Bye Man is, how he operates, what one should and shouldn’t do, and how to stop him.