The Babadook

Australian actress Jennifer Kent makes her writing/directing début with this fresh spin on the oft-told horror story of a family haunted by something dark that has invaded the safety of their home. The Babadook, a feature-length version of Kent’s award-winning short film Monster, delivers visceral thrills and chills as well as a cerebral meditation on melancholy themes of grief, loss, fear, hopelessness, and parental responsibility. Essie Davis plays Amelia, a single mother widowed on the day her only son Samuel was born. She’s still mourning the loss of her husband nearly seven years later when Samuel (Noah Wiseman) begins to develop fears that she too will die or that a monster will come to kill them both. Samuel’s nightmarish imaginings and behavioral problems worsen after the appearance of a mysterious, Edward-Gorey-like pop-up book about a shadowy creature called “Mr. Babadook.”  For the stressed Amelia, Samuel’s hallucinations and his obsession with this monster start out as yet another issue with her increasingly difficult child, but she too soon falls under the spell of the sinister presence. 

Like some of the best horror movies, The Babadook can be viewed either as a supernatural tale or a psychological thriller.  As Roman Polanski did in Rosemary's Baby (1968), the classic about a young, pregnant woman who slowly comes to believe that the child she’s carrying is the spawn of Satan, Kent aims to keep her film ambiguous and open for interpretation. We can watch this movie as a straightforward horror story about a mother and son tormented by a murderous demon, or we can view it as a film about the mental breakdown of a depressed, over-extended, single parent of an emotionally disturbed child. The Babadook would make an equally good double feature with Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) as it would with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) or Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist (1982).

But unlike Rosemary's Baby--or Repulsion, The Haunting, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, or other intriguingly ambiguous horror stories--The Babadook unintentionally favors one interpretation over another. If this film tells the straightforward tale of a haunting, then the story is incited by the strange appearance of the “Mr. Babadook” book on Samuel’s bedroom shelf. But if what happens is a metaphor for the psychotic break of a grieving and pressured parent, then the story lacks a catalyst. We’re given no understanding of why Amelia starts to snap at this particular point in time--why her seventh year as a widowed single mother is different from her sixth or fifth. The film’s exciting climax also doesn’t fully work if viewed as a metaphor for a mother overcoming psychosis--though the film’s conclusion is quite effective when read this way.

Putting aside The Babadook’s provocative themes and concentrating on the filmmaker’s craft, this low-budget movie is exceptionally well made. Kent’s imaginative visual style creates a world of repressed melancholy that turns darker and more frightening once the Babadook is invited in. Her strong sense of scenic design and pictorial composition, combined with an inspired “hand-made” directorial quality, is on par with the work of Guillermo del Toro--but infinitely more subtle and restrained. Along with her two lead actors, she creates vibrant characters that remain deeply sympathetic even after they become disturbed and violent. Davis (a supporting player in films like Australia, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and The Matrix sequels) finds a wide range of ways to play her character’s restricted emotional states of depressed, scared, angry, and desperate. It’s an impressive ability she shares with her fellow countryman Naomi Watts, whom she resembles slightly. Like Watts, it’s easy to envision Davis becoming a major star able to open and carry a film on her own. Young Noah Wiseman, making an intense, vulnerable, and memorable début, never reduces Samuel to a movie cliché. He’s more complex than a standard “evil child” or a simple pawn in the “little-kid-in-jeopardy” mold. We come to know Samuel and Amelia well through these performances, and we feel genuine concern for them. The Babadook himself is artfully rendered, though his physical manifestations are never as creepy or hauntingly beautiful as in the book that introduces us to him. 

Unfortunately, the film is hindered by the redundant pattern it follows in which things get worse and worse, then a little better, then worse and worse again, and then a little better, and so on. This narrative construction should build tension in the viewer, as if the walls of a room are slowly closing in on us, but instead we find ourselves growing impatient, waiting for anticipated events to happen. Part of the problem is that Kent tells us in advance what’s coming. About halfway through, the “Mr. Babadook” book reappears to Amelia with its pages altered to illustrate a series of terrible things that she will soon do. This type of extreme foreshadowing is a bold choice to make in a movie, but it requires an ability to keep surprising an audience, even after telling us what to expect, that this film doesn’t quite achieve. 

Despite these weaknesses, The Babadook is a stunning debut for Kent as a writer/director, Davis as a leading actress, and Wiseman as a child actor. It harkens back to the great emotional and psychological horror films of the 1970s, without ever feeling retro or antiquated. It gives nuanced attention to single motherhood, a subject rarely accorded much focus in genre movies of any type. And it delivers the shivers, shocks, and scares that most contemporary audiences want when they go to a horror movie.