Review: The Babadook

Essie Davis has been raising her 6 year-old son Noah Wiseman since a tragic car accident took her husband’s life on the day the boy was born. She clearly hasn’t quite recovered from the grief, and not making matters easier is the volatile behaviour of young Wiseman, who doesn’t appear to play well with others. One day he gives her a book to read him at bedtime. This is the book of the film’s title, though Davis claims to have never seen the book before and wonders where the boy got it. As she reads it, she realises the book and the ghastly illustrations accompanying it are anything but appropriate for children. Basically, it concerns a demonic creature lurking in the shadows that wants to kill. Uh, and it’s also a pop-up book for good measure. Yeah. Wiseman is terrified, Davis gets rid of the book and that’s the end of that, she hopes. It’s not...boy is it ever not. Noises, shadows, and sheer terror ensue.

 

A huge surprise from writer-director Jennifer Kent, this 2014 psychological horror-drama is as far as I’m concerned, the most legit scary horror film I’ve seen in decades. Whether that’s a big call or not, I suppose depends on how scary you find horror films of the last couple of decades. For me, there’s been precious few, and this is definitely one of them. I’m sure I’ll be accused of favouritism given it’s an Aussie film, but let me assure you, I’m pretty harsh on a lot of films from my country. No, this is just that freaking good.

 

Kent starts us off with a deliberately aggravating, intensely unnerving opener. There’s a deliberately irritating use of sound, meant to keep you on edge. There’s something uncomfortably claustrophobic about this mother-son circumstance, and I’m not just talking about the son jumping on his mum’s bed while she’s mid-masturbation. Noah Wiseman is terrific as young Samuel, a character who will drive you up the wall just as it does his mother, played by Essie Davis. Some found they hated Wiseman’s character, but it’s pretty obvious that this kid is clearly troubled, probably somewhere on the spectrum. His home life has recently changed on him, not something that is easy for a young fella to deal with either. He’s meant to be kind of irritating, and he can’t help it. At such a young age, Wiseman shows great maturity in being able to play such a troubled young boy. He’s believably disturbed…and believably disturbing. Essie Davis is believably wearied by and worried by her son. Moreover, she sells every transition of her character effortlessly and seamlessly. Her character is in her own way just as disturbed and disturbing at certain points as her on-screen son. I bet this wasn’t an easy film to make, and I hope Ms. Davis was able to shake the character off as she left the set each day. Ain’t no way you wanna be taking any of this home with you, as the film pulls no punches and is somewhat of an endurance test. There’s one act of cruelty in particular that had me shouting a shocked obscenity at the television, I was so stunned and horrified. This is not your run of the mill popcorn horror pic, folks. Meanwhile, both she and Wiseman actually give you an appreciation for what parents, especially single parents of troubled (or special needs) kids go through. This is one of those rare films that manages to be fantastical and realistic in the same film, without it seeming like two films strung together (At certain points you’re asking Is The Babadook literally real? A figment of someone’s imagination? A figment of imagination somehow now brought into reality?).

 

The film may have fairly familiar elements (think “Repulsion” meets “Candyman” by way of 70s Aussie New Wave), but it makes up for that with sheer terror. The title book is seriously the most Satanically-derived monstrosity I’ve come across. It is the product of a sick, sick mind. Seriously, it’s the Pop-Up Book of Evil and if it were real I would hope that I’d never come across it. It’s not just the book that I found unsettling, however. We get the creepiest and most disturbing phone call since the original “Black Christmas”, and when the title creature speaks…it’s easily the most horrific and unsettling sound I’ve heard since the spaceships in Spielberg’s underrated and (for me at least) genuinely terrifying “War of the Worlds”. I’m not kidding, it nearly made me lose my bearings. I always find sound FX are a lot scarier when they’re not so alien that you don’t have a clue what they could be, yet aren’t so familiar that you know exactly what the sound is the moment you hear it. It has to be familiar, but not immediately identifiable. It’s a terrific-looking horror film, and there’s no doubt that filmmaker Kent and her cinematographer have seen Murnau’s 1927 classic “Nosferatu” as well as plenty of Lon Chaney’s silent horror films. It’s a wonderfully gloom and doom-y, shadowy-looking film that was right up my Gothic/German Expressionist/Hammer horror alley. There’s lots of characters framed in unsettling and distorted or strangely still ways that might remind you of the superior 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (another genuinely scary film). The film definitely wears its genre references on its sleeve, but as much as the finale has elements of “The Haunting”, “Repulsion”, and “Poltergeist”, it still forges its own identity. I wish it ran at a slightly quicker pace, but that’s it for flaws as far as I’m concerned.

 

A rare horror film that is actually genuinely scary, instead of just making you jump, and makes an attempt at also grounding itself in a reality you can at least buy into for 90 minutes or so. A critically-acclaimed horror film that actually lived up to the hype for me, and even exceeded it.  

 

Rating: B+