Film / Reviews
The Babadook
The Babadook (15)
Australia 2014 93 mins Dir: Jennifer Kent Starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Hayley McElhinney, Benjamin Winspear
Characters you wouldn’t want to be in a horror movie: the town slut, the sceptic, the black kid, the family pet. So things aren’t looking too rosy for Bugsy, the cute mutt owned by Amelia (Essie Davis) and her six-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). But that’s pretty much the only horror cliché to be found in Australian director Jennifer Kent’s ‘The Babadook’, which dares to be strikingly original and grounded in real fears at a time when Hollywood continues to coin it with cheapjack ouija board and possessed doll horrors.
We learn fairly early on that Amelia’s husband Oskar (Benjamin Winspear) was killed in a collision while driving her to hospital to give birth to Samuel nearly seven years ago. That’s because Sam trots out this conversation stopper to complete strangers at every opportunity. Little wonder this mother/son relationship is a tad complicated. Amelia seems permanently frazzled and on edge, haunted by flashbacks to the accident. Tousle-haired Sam doesn’t help matters by being, frankly, a vile, disruptive brat armed with a lethal home-made dart gun. One night, he presents Amelia with a new book that has appeared on his shelf, entitled Mister Babadook, and asks her to read it as his bedtime story. A beautifully hand-crafted pop-up tome, its increasingly macabre nursery rhyme story – Dr. Seuss channelling Poe – shocks Amelia and terrifies Sam. But it’s too late to go back now. They have invited the sinister, amorphous, spiky-footed, top-hatted Babadook into their creaky old home.
Using puppetry and Jan Svankmajer-style stop-motion animation rather than ubiquitous CGI, Kent conjures up a magnificently unsettling expressionist boogeyman, knowingly referencing Murnau’s Nosferatu and several Georges Melies shorts. She also delivers some imaginatively sinister twists. When Amelia destroys the book, it simply reappears, stitched back together with some alarming new text added. This is as much about grief and loss as it is about the monster making peculiar noises under the bed, which renders the story all the more potent. Because it’s a genre flick, Essie Davis probably won’t get the awards she so richly deserves for her performance as the visibly exhausted Amelia, whose disintegration takes an unexpected turn. And this is a rare occasion when you really do yearn for a tie-in book.
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