Review: "The Babadook"

KENT, Jennifer, (Writer/Dir.), “The Babadook”, 2013, Babadook Films Pty. Ltd., Causeway Films Pty. Ltd., South Australian Film Corporation, & Screen Australia

Unfortunately, this is not going to be a film for everyone. I liked it a lot – even despite the fact that bratty, ill-mannered kids make my teeth buckle outwards. For many people out there it’s going to strike a definite chord, although whether it’s the right one, or the one that the director intends, is going to be permanently up for debate.

The premise is this: Amelia lives alone with her son Samuel, a very bright and overly-imaginative child. Seven years ago, while en route to the hospital to deliver herself of Samuel, Amelia and her husband were involved in a car accident, from which, we learn, said husband did not survive. Amelia has given up her creative life as a children’s book writer to focus on bringing up Samuel, working as a drudge in an aged persons’ care facility. Samuel, as the movie opens, is having difficulties going to sleep at night due to the fact that he believes there is a monster in his cupboard or under the bed. His sleeplessness affects Amelia, causing her sleep debt to pile up to dangerous levels. When a strange book entitled “Mister Babadook” appears in the house – a terrifying kid’s pop-up book resembling the combined nightmare leftovers of Shaun Tan and Jan Svankmajer – Samuel becomes convinced that “the Babadook” is entirely real, and soon Amelia starts to think that his impossibility is no longer an option as well.

From here, the narrative tracks Amelia and Samuel’s individual responses to the threat. Amelia digs her heels in and sets course for denial; Samuel begins preparations in earnest, building all kinds of weapons to take the Babadook out, weapons which get him taken out of school. Samuel’s anxious ranting about the monster grates on Amelia’s nerves as she desperately tries to hold things together, getting less and less sleep. As Samuel’s screeching ratchets up to nerve-shredding levels, her coping strategies collapse, her lies and dodges become exposed, and she loses it completely. Then Mr. Babadook comes to call.

I’m guessing that the director was striving for some metaphorical look at what happens in the lives of single-parents with demanding children when the pressures of daily life become too much. Using the device of the Babadook as a symbol for the weight of modern existence under which the toughest nerves can fray, this notion is convincingly conveyed; however, it loses some of its bite in the film’s effort to convince us that the monster under the bed is in fact a reality. I admit I kept waiting for moments where Amelia’s sleepless state would be used as an excuse for her seeing something unusual but it doesn’t really happen. She’s more focussed on keeping Samuel from talking to other people about it than trying to sort out if the threat is an actual one. Even when she finally goes to the police – assuming that the Babadook is the persona du guerre of some crazy stalker – she is warned off from lodging her complaint by the monster himself.

Of course, this is the choice of the director and there’s little to be done about it. I would have liked a film where the reality of the creature was in dispute for as long as possible, not just an assumed feature of the narrative from the get-go, but that’s just me. After watching the movie through, I turned to the special features on the disc to watch “Monster”, the short film that was the seed for the later movie. The DNA is very clear here, and the short length of the piece made the concept much tighter and snappier, although any forays into the realm of metaphor were brief at best. Seeing both works brought the concept into sharp focus, although I’m torn between which one I would consider the better exposition.

The larger stage of the main film allows other chilling elements to creep in too. Amelia’s sister and niece, the school principals, the welfare workers, the policemen, are all coldly oblivious to the fact that Amelia’s world is exploding and that they are helping not at all. Her co-worker at the aged care facility is the only helpful individual in the background and he comes off as slightly creepy too (even though the lack of physical and emotional intimacy is one of Amelia’s biggest issues); sadly, just when he looks like he might be a surprise ‘Mr. Right’, he too cops the wrong end of Amelia’s ad hoc coping strategies and Samuel’s inability to stop blurting out the truth and he leaves in a huff.

Essie Davis (known in TV-land as Miss Phryne Fisher from the “Miss Fisher Investigates” series based on Kerry Greenwood’s crime novel oeuvre) is fantastic in “The Babadook” and gives a bravura performance; grudgingly, I have to acknowledge that the young actor playing Samuel belted it out of the park too, despite the caveat I presented above about my response to ill-mannered kids. The film looks amazing and the monster – the eponymous Babadook – is enough to give anyone the willies.

One downside – and again, it’s highly personal – is that there’s violence against animals as a feature of this flick. And no, I didn’t need to stick in a ‘Spoiler Alert!’ there, as it’s flagged very early on in the proceedings. I don’t care what people do to each other, people are idiots; hurting animals is bad, even if it’s “just part of a movie”. People are barbaric to animals all day every day and no-one should be out there encouraging them. This element of the film was not particularly shocking – because, foreshadowed – but waiting for it to happen was almost unendurable. And the fact that there is no real punishment for this despicable act of cruelty at the movie’s end left a bad taste in my mouth too. Again, other people won’t have my qualms about this.

All-in-all, I’m giving this four Tentacled Horrors, despite the animal cruelty and the shrill child. It’s tightly written (although the intent of the director/writer is a little vaguely stated), beautifully put together and excellently acted. And it passed the acid test: I had nightmares about dark figures in top hats afterwards. Yummy, yummy, nightmares...