The Babadook

Director: Jennifer Kent
Screenplay: Jennifer Kent
Stars: Essie Davis (Amelia), Noah Wiseman (Samuel), Barbara West (Mrs. Roach), Hayley McElhinney (Claire), Daniel Henshall (Robbie), Cathy Adamek (Prue), Benjamin Winspear (Oskar), Adam Morgan (Police Sergeant), Craig Behenna (Warren), Terence Crawford (Doctor), Carmel Johnson (Teacher)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2014
Country: Australia
The Babadook
The BabadookLike the best horror films, Jennifer Kent’s Australian import The Babadook is about much more than its surface scares. Set primarily in a drab brownstone occupied by a widowed mother and her precocious six-year-old son, the film indulges in all manner of familiar fright tactics, giving us strange scratching noises, moving shadows, and things going bump in the night, all of which may or may not be emanating from a character’s tormented psyche. Yet Kent, an actress making her feature film directing debut, redeems the horror clichés by making them meaningful; she grounds the fright in real, recognizable human emotions, which makes The Babdook as dramatically compelling as it is scary (and it is, indeed, very scary).

We first see the mother, Amelia (Essie Davis), in close-up in a disorienting slow-motion sequence that we gradually realize is a horrific car accident that claims the life of her husband, leaving her to raise her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), alone. Amelia works as a caregiver at a retirement home, and from the very beginning we can see that she is stressed to the breaking point. The monotony of her job is something of a respite from the weight of taking care of Samuel, a sweet-faced, bright-eyed, and very sensitive little boy who is tormented by fears of monsters living under his bed or in his closet. Imaginative and precocious, Samuel is fascinated by magic tricks and has already starting building homemade weapons and booby traps to protect him and his mom from whatever might be lurking in the shadows, although his forthrightness in discussing his fears does not endear him to either his well-meaning, but condescending teachers or his Aunt Claire (Hayley McElhinney), who tries to be helpful, but is too busy raising her own daughter and trying not to let Samuel’s “weirdness” affect her.

Kent, who both wrote and directed, demonstrates the best kind of narrative economy, packing each scene with a maximum of both narrative information and character building. She keeps the story moving forward, but not in a way that feels rushed, as she allows the dramatic structure of Amelia and Samuel’s increasingly stressed life to fully take shape before introducing the film’s supernatural incursion, which begins with the inexplicable appearance of a large red pop-up book in Samuel’s room.

Titled Mister Babadook (an anagram of “bad book”), it looks like something Tim Burton might have designed if he completely lost his sense of mordant humor, and Amelia can’t even bring herself to finish it because it creeps her out so much and reduces Samuel to wailing in abject fear. The book depicts Mr. Babadook as an eerie, frightfully grinning fiend in a cape and top hat with unnaturally long fingers that is hiding in a wardrobe that looks unnervingly similar to the ones in both Samuel and Amelia’s bedrooms. Even when Amelia tears the book up and tries to throw it away, it shows up again on the front step, mysteriously taped back together and featuring new pages that suggest she will be possessed by the Babadook and inflict violence on Samuel and the family dog.

Kent is clearly steeped in the history of horror, as her depiction of the Babadook is an amalgam of a number of classical horror figures—the clothes of the mad doctor in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the weird grinning visage of Lon Chaney’s vampire in Tod Browning’s lost London After Midnight (1927), and Max Shreck’s elongated digits in Nosferatu (1922). The film’s evocative visual sense also plays homage to the genre’s development, as it slowly morphs from a kind of drab realism to an increasingly expressionist sensibility that turns the film’s otherwise mundane locations into an extension of Amelia’s growing psychosis. Horror’s long history is also evoked via the glowing television set, which always seems to be playing something weird or uncanny, whether it be old silent shorts by Georges Méliès or Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960).

Yet, Kent ensures that the film’s visual terrors are put primarily in the service of conveying the film’s real horror: Amelia’s conflicted sense of motherhood. Essie Davis, a veteran actress of both stage and screen, is phenomenal as the tortured single mom, straining to get through each day on virtually no sleep and the constant pressure of being expected to do everything. The film is deeply empathetic in conveying her sense of loneliness and isolation, which tie emotionally into her growing sense of resentment that is exploited by the presence of the Babadook.

Kent keeps the film’s monster primarily confined to the shadows, which makes him all the more effective as a generator of chills, but also ensures that he doesn’t take over the show. Whether the Babadook is technically real or not—a debate that is currently raging in more than a few Internet forums—is ultimately beside the point because his existence matters only in relation to Amelia’s own internal battle. It is gradually revealed (small spoiler alert!) that her husband was killed while driving her to the hospital to have Samuel; thus, her child’s birthday coincides with her spouse’s death day, ensuring that the two can never be separated. Her repressed resentment toward Samuel, which is fueled by his increasingly strange and even aggressive behavior, warps her own sensibilities and threatens to turn her into the knife-wielding psychopath foreshadowed by the pop-up book. The strength and depth of Davis’s often transformative performance keeps us empathizing with her even as she slips further down the darkest of paths; her descend is as sad as it is terrifying.

Thus, The Babadook is not so much about a shadowy supernatural figure lurking in the corner as it is about very real parental fears about inadequacy and conflicted love. When Amelia snaps at one point and screams at Samuel “Why can’t you just be normal?!?,” it is not just a moment of emotional rupture for the character, but a sharp reminder of how scary the failure to achieve “normality” can be. There is nothing normal about anything that is happening to Amelia and Samuel, yet the film still rings true on a dramatic level, ensuring that The Babadook is not just a shadowy freakshow, but rather an unnerving dramatization of the power of maternal love and the horrors that follows in its absence.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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All images copyright © IFC Midnight

Overall Rating: (3.5)




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