For Elliot, a young man who became an orphan at a young age and was raised and educated by his older brother Virgil according to the ideals of friendship and family, a more than rosy and promising period of satisfactions is about to begin. A meritorious student with a very high average, Elliot is about to take another indispensable step as he is preparing to go live with his girlfriend Sasha and his best friend John. A happy and carefree picture spoiled, however, by a disturbing presence that lurks inside the house, whose appearance is in reality already not very reassuring in itself. It is the Bye Bye Man, a demon that clouds the mind and leads it to obsession and that is released as a result of an improvised séance performed by a girl present at a party given by the protagonists to inaugurate their new home. From that moment on, a series of strange events begins with Elliot dealing with strange visions that make him see a reality different from what it is and that will drag him into a very dangerous spiral of madness.
It has become a frequent and sad habit to learn through newspapers and television of massacres and scenes of unheard-of violence that have as their stage domestic environments, public places, and so many other places that, from welcoming refuges, turn into real death traps, made so by the ruthless and sudden madness of a single person. But what happens in the minds of these people? What or who can unleash such a murderous instinct?
An answer tries to give Stacy Title who, with her new film, titled "The Bye Bye Man," tells, with a clearly fantastical reconstruction, a true story that occurred in Wisconsin in 1990 and that involves several young men who, from friends, ended up killing each other. An excellent starting point squandered, however, by a conventional, predictable, and ineffective horror film in transmitting the right and desirable dose of fear in the viewer.
Title, who had not been behind the camera for about ten years, shows that she is still a bit rusty in directing, and this affects the fact that her film does not have the credentials to impose itself on the attention of genre enthusiasts and occasional viewers. With the exception of the fascinating and suggestive look of the Bye Bye Man (played by Doug Jones), in fact, "The Bye Bye Man" is constantly marred by a screenplay full of question marks, obvious forcings, and steeped in situations on the verge of the unbelievable and the grotesque that even elicit some involuntary laughter, in addition to transmitting a permanent feeling of déjà vu perceptible from the first scenes of the film. As if these defects were not enough, the characters are not well developed, and their descent into obsession and subsequent madness is described with such approximation and superficiality that they do not create empathy or involvement in the viewer.
If the psychological aspect of the story appears lacking, things go even worse regarding the construction of sequences that succeed in the intention of scaring or, in any case, creating tension and suspense. The aforementioned fascinating aspect of the demon (whose name in reality makes him quite unscary) is unfortunately inserted within anonymous, cold, and poorly lit environments by a photography even incapable of creating those typical shadow games that would have at least favored the usual expedients to generate some easy scares.
Anonymous and impalpable are also the performances of a cast made up of, in addition to the already mentioned Jones, Douglas Smith (already involved in the horror genre with "Ouija"), Lucien Laviscount, Cressida Bonas, and Micheal Trucco.
"The Bye Bye Man," in conclusion, goes to the archives as a good opportunity wasted and a forgettable horror film, even discouraged for spending a night at the cinema between some jumps from the chair and nightmares.
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