The Babadook (2014, Dir. Jennifer Kent):
If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look
You can’t get rid of the Babadook.
See him in your room at night
And you won’t sleep a wink.
I’ll soon take off my funny disguise
(Take heed of what you’ve read)
And once you see what’s underneath
You’re going to wish that you were dead.
Most horror movies hold out the promise that you’ll be shocked by the unexpected, when in reality what you see is the same old stuff repeated again and again. The Babadook takes the opposite approach: within the first 12 minutes you’re given the gameplan for what will occur over the next hour, and the fact you know what’s coming doesn’t lessen the impact of the scares one bit. The film is a fine throwback to psychological chillers like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby, where what goes on in our protagonist’s head (and what we can’t see) is far more horrifying than any clang on the soundtrack, or any monster sliding out of the shadows.
Amelia (Esse Davis), self-abnegating and put-upon, is a woman on the edge of a textbook nervous breakdown. Widowed ever since her husband was killed in a car crash while she was on her way to give birth, she’s up against a daily grind of nearly Sisyphean proportions: her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman, positioned perfectly on the axis between cute and creepy) is acting out and on the verge of getting expelled from school, she’s stuck in a dead-end job at a nursing home, and her only relation, sister Claire (Hayley McElhinney), isn’t much interested in having anything to do with her. It’s a cold world indeed when your best friend turns out be the next-door neighbor who’s dying of Parkinson’s. In Babadook‘s marvelous opening scenes, first-time writer and director Jennifer Kent sketches out all these details — as well as Amelia’s ambivalence over her son, who she not-so-silently blames for her husband’s death — with such skill that the movie could stand on its own as a devastating character study. And then Amelia and Samuel stumble upon a pop-up book called The Babadook, which assures them that the cloaked, grinning creature known as the Babadook will be paying them a visit, and predicts that once he does, he’ll never leave.
The stage is thus set for a two-hander in which Amelia and precocious Samuel (who is obsessed with magic and monster-hunting weapons) face their dark night of the soul. The Babdook is at its most frightening when it stays in the matter-of-fact, and blurs the line between reality and nightmare. We laugh as a zoned-out Amelia watches Mario Bava’s “The Drop of Water” from Black Sabbath on the telly, and then the laughter catches in our throats when we realize that her sanity is eroding much like the heroine of Bava’s film. Commonplace happenings (an aching tooth, cockroaches scuttling on the floor, a cellar crammed with memorabilia) gain totemic significance. We wonder if these events are precursors to the Babadook’s grand entrance, or if they’re the creation of Amelia’s increasingly murderous imagination. Is Amelia’s forcing of tranquilizers on Samuel the frazzled act of a bad mother, or the Babadook coming out to play? In the hands of the wrong actors, this could all easily go to pot, but fortunately we have Esse Davis, who is harrowing as Amelia. Every time the camera creeps up to her parched face and dark, pained eyes, it’s a double shock: we’re all too aware that she could go bonkers at any second, and yet she also reminds us that there’s a soul buried under all the horror mechanics.
The film overplays its hand when it tries to go fancy: the Babadook itself is a mass of rickety CGI, and some late-game Exorcist-style effects seem like overkill. Kent might have been better served to maintain a sense of mystery about whether the goings-on are real, rather than resort to a big-bang conclusion. Some might also find the film’s denouement a bit too easy, given the relentless darkness of the previous 90 minutes. But when the Babadook has hold of Amelia and Samuel is cornered in that cellar, it’s impossible not to get caught up in the story’s visceral grip. More modest than your standard glossy horror flick and way more upsetting, The Babadook succeeds because it understands the the real boogeyman is not the one that hides in your closet but the one that lurks in your soul, masked by the ugliness of the everyday.
