Horror brought to book in scary-delicious fashion
Movie carries a lot of baggage, but it creates characters worth caring about
★★ ★ ★ Starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman Directed by: Jennifer Kent Duration: 94 minutes If you go to see The Babadook, be sure to have your wits about you. This movie will scare you out of them.
Essie Davis stars as Amelia, a single woman who’s had her share of hard knocks on the road of motherhood. Her husband died in a car crash taking her to the hospital to give birth; as a result, sixyear-old Samuel (Noah Wiseman) has never had a proper birthday.
He’s a troubled child — or, to put the best possible face on it, an imaginative one. Terrified at the prospect of monsters under his bed, he’s crafted his own backmounted trebuchet and a kiddie crossbow that fires real darts. Other parents are understandably wary around the pint-sized ghostbuster, and school has just expelled him.
But it doesn’t pay to ignore kids in horror movies. Whether dead people or just garden-variety monsters, what they see is usually real. Even so, writer/director Jennifer Kent refuses to show her cards too early in this, her first feature film. Samuel may be making things up, suffering from hallucinations or actually witnessing frightful things. And as the plot progresses, we begin to wonder if maybe his mother isn’t the one who is delusional, or perhaps haunted.
The film’s title — an anagram of A BAD BOOK, by the way — refers to a children’s book that somehow finds its way into Amelia’s hands. And while the pop-up narrative starts out in a friendly/scary vein, it finishes with an arterial sluice of dread that has Samuel crying out loud while Amelia first shreds and then burns the book.
Every horror film must explain why its protagonist is isolated; it’s why the last house on the left at the end of the street is such a popular setting. And Kent’s reasoning is tidier than most. Amelia and her son have alienated themselves from neighbourhood society thanks to the kid’s violent ways and the mother’s on-edge demeanour. “The Babadook will eat your mom for breakfast,” Samuel tells one girl who refuses to believe.
He then pushes her out of a tree house for good measure. No more playdates for him.
The Babadook’s chills come from multiple directions. To be sure, there are the sudden glimpses of something dark and scary, and the lights that flicker as though powered by spectre-icity. The television, meanwhile, seems constantly tuned to a mix of old monster movies, bad news and the gorier kinds of nature shows. And there are camera tricks that make time slide by terrifyingly, like a freight train rushing past your cheek, giving the impression that Amelia isn’t sleeping more than a few minutes each night.
But we are also made to appreciate her ongoing grief at the loss of her husband, and her loneliness and frustration at bringing up a difficult child.
After all, her best-case scenario is a son with severe emotional problems.
That’s a lot of baggage for a horror film, but it helps ground us in the characters and care about their welfare.
And such depth doesn’t come from nowhere.
Ten years ago, Kent’s first film was an award-winning short called Monster, which featured all the basic elements of The Babadook. The feature has had all that time to simmer and thicken; the result is scary-delicious.