Although it shares a similar title, “Bagman” is not an adaptation of Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz’s best-selling account of Spiro Agnew’s crimes. Nominally an original screenplay by John Hulme, it instead feels like an adaptation of a short story that Stephen King might have once tossed off to kill time during an extended commute. Actually, that isn’t fair because even one of his actual discards might have contained scarier moments than are on display here. The only chance of experiencing any actual chills is if you doze off and generate a more interesting nightmare of your own.
Facing financial problems stemming from his thwarted dream of building a state-of-the-art tree trimmer, Patrick McKee (Sam Claflin) is forced to move back to his childhood home, along with wife Karina (Antonia Thomas) and toddler son Jake (Carnell Vincent Rhodes), and go to work for his brother Liam (Steven Cree) at the family lumber yard. They barely settle in when Patrick starts hearing strange noises outside late at night and begins having nightmares about Jake being kidnapped. Things start getting more intense—lights begin flickering on and off, a creepy-looking doll turns up, and it seems as if something has wormed its way into the house. But there’s no real proof that anything has happened. Nevertheless, Patrick is convinced something out there is making strange noises (which sound like if The Iron Giant ate some bad clams) and that his entire family, especially Jake, is in danger.
As it turns out, Patrick knows what he’s talking about. As a child, he learned from his father about Bagman, an ancient evil entity who supposedly lurks within a nearby abandoned copper mine and who immobilizes parents before grabbing their children—the good ones, not the bad ones as one might expect—and stuffing them in his bag, never to be seen again. At first, he assumed it was merely a story. But then he had his own encounter with Bagman, from which he only narrowly escaped. Two decades later, Bagman is back (we see him snatching another kid in the pre-credits sequence) to haunt Patrick’s family, and he must face his old fear once again to protect his son.
I suggested earlier that “Bagman” felt like a Stephen King knockoff, but that’s not precisely true nor entirely fair. More generally, this film seems to have been constructed almost entirely out of the hoariest cliches and tropes that the horror genre offers. That’s nothing new in horror, but good filmmakers have taken care to present those ideas with a certain flair or energy that allows them to work once again. By comparison, director Colm McCarthy, whose previous credits include episodes of “Doctor Who” and “Peaky Blinders” and the dystopian sci-fi silliness of “The Girl with All the Gifts,” plods through them in a manner so dodgy it feels like he needs a nap even more than his beleaguered hero. I get that he and Hulme are trying to do something closer to an old-fashioned spook story, but it feels as if their only exposure to such things may have only been a couple of “Scooby-Doo” episodes. Even those had more satisfying denouements than “Bagman.”
Although “Bagman” is ostensibly a horror film, the closest it ever gets to something nightmarish is the kid’s constant tooting of a recorder—mostly because it sends chills down the spines of those foolish enough to have presented such instruments to their own children. Other than that, it’s a total dud through and through—it’s only surprising in that it somehow managed to get a theatrical release, rather than being treated to a streaming service that, if you’re lucky, you dropped long ago.
