The Babadook [M]

It’s been years since Amelia’s husband died in a car accident, but still poor Amelia isn’t holding up very well. Her house is gloomy, her job is monotonous, her boss is tyrannical, and to top it off her son, Sam, is going through some serious social and behavioural problems. At her wits end, things take a turn for the fatally worse when a strange children’s book is discovered on Sam’s shelf and they read it together. Soon afterwards, Sam is insisting that the book’s monster, the Babadook, is real and out to get them and when strange knocking sounds and a spectral figure starts to plague the house, the nightmare becomes all too real.  

Truly terrifying and disturbing, The Babadook is a fantastic horror movie to come out of Australian cinema. A landmark of simplicity made significant by brilliant performances from the two leads as well as a mound of other stuff I’ll get to later, this movie sends the mind reeling with interpretations, emotions, and a strong pull of anticipation and suspense for the impending shock of something horrifying or violent. It seriously does batter you about emotionally and it’s a thrilling experience. 

A little like The Shining in that it treads the boards of both supernatural horror movie and psychological thriller, The Babadook is a movie where there’s a lot going on. It explores very strong themes of repressed anger, unsatisfied bereavement, social isolation, parental struggle, and depression. Throw in there this unexplained supernatural monster from a children’s book, the silhouette of which is enough to give anyone nightmares, and things get a little screwy. There’s a large number of ways you can interpret this movie and that’s the beauty of it, even if sometimes the psychological aspect of it seems a bit ham-fisted. The ending, for me, is a little bit of a question mark, but the great thing about movies at the end of the day is that everyone can take away from them what they want and there’s no real wrong interpretation. 

One thing that I really did enjoy about this film was its attention to other movies of the genre. The crudity of the book of The Babadook, the pop-up pictures and creepy caricatures, gets heightened and made even scarier (as if it needed to be) by the injection of scenes from iconic black and white horror movies that Amelia watches to avoid sleep. We see snippets from silent movies such as The Phantom of the Opera, London After Midnight, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, all freakishly heightening the hyper-stylishness of the movie and its expressionist tropes. The appearance of the Babadook itself seems to pay homage to various characters of cinema including Dr. Caligari and Lon Chaney’s character in London After Midnight with the top hat and cape, but also Edward Scissorhands and Freddy Krueger with the sharp, knife-like fingers. Recurring motifs, symmetry within the mise-en-scene of various shots, as well as the multiple shots that depict some kind of portal be it door, window, cupboard, or mouth, all work wonderfully within this film to make it this rich and actually quite terrifying piece of work. I will shamelessly admit that I had my hands over my face many times during this movie. 

The performances from both Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman are brilliant with Essie almost seamlessly slipping from wicked witch to Glinda the good and becomes hugely terrifying when she plays the role of the ‘possessed’. Noah succeeds in being both ridiculously sweet and hair-tearingly irritating, shifting from one to the other as seamlessly as Essie. The two together work phenomenally well and because the mother-son relationship here is a very peculiar one, the apparent lack of chemistry between Essie and Noah actually brings more to the film than a ‘normal’ depiction could. 

Starring Hayley McElhinney, Daniel Henshall, Barbara West, Benjamin Winspear, and Chloe Hurn (another child actor so good at playing the horrible little shit), The Babadook is a visually rich movie that really does deliver the scares. Filled with suspense, drama, violence, love, and possibly the freakiest pop-up book ever, it’s terrifying, but it’s really very wonderful when you stop and consider all the things that make it so nightmarish. I know that I’m not going to sleep tonight.