"The Babadook" review

Thrills, chills and most importantly, smarts!

When teenagers became the default target audience for horror films in the early nineties, the variety of scary movies narrowed so drastically that the entire genre was notoriously rebranded as “torture porn”… a succinct summation, as the aberrant whiplash from jiggling breasts to jittering entrails is ridiculous and repulsive.  This cinematic schizophrenia presents a particular problem for older, more discerning viewers who prefer a story that involves more than boobs and bloodshed.  Thankfully, “The Babadook” is utterly absent the hormonal illogic of adolescence: it is an intelligent and mature supernatural thriller.

Writer/director Jennifer Kent’s debut is a baroque descent into madness.  The story is meticulously crafted, in large part because the characters and setting are so realistic and compelling.  Single mother Amelia, stoically portrayed by Essie Davis, struggles to raise her quirky six-year-old son, Samuel, in a startling performance by Noah Wiseman.  Amelia works in a nursing home, and is still trying to reconcile the death of her beloved husband in a car accident on the day of Daniel’s birth.  Amelia is also grappling with Daniel’s behavioral oddities which have made him a pariah at school.  Though their life is stressful, they take solace in each other.

However, Amelia and Daniel’s strained existence soon becomes haunted by a growing anxiety.  The fear germinates from what appears to be a children’s book called “Mister Babadook.”  Though the text is benign, the starkly illustrated pop-up pages reveal a looming, amorphous figure with dagger-like fingers and a clown face of leering malevolence.  It seems likes spooky but harmless fun, but afterwards Daniel begins having horrible hallucinations.  Essie tries to destroy the book, but it reappears unharmed and even more ghastly things begin to manifest themselves.

What started as a smoldering ember of apprehension is slowly yet diabolically fanned into an inferno of white-hot paranormal panic.  Amelia and Daniel find themselves relentlessly stalked by a specter that threatens to destroy them from the inside out.  The Babadook wants to devour their sanity as well as their souls.  Creaking doors, thumping walls and shaking beds turn Amelia and Daniel’s nights into a hellish trial of sleep deprivation.  Pushed to the brink of exhaustion, Amelia’s rationality unravels and she lashes out violently, even at her bewildered child.

“The Babadook” teases the mind and triggers the gooseflesh because the film relies not on visual effects, but on the reactions of the characters to convey the emotional shocks.  The actor’s expressions are thrillingly frightful precisely because the audience is left to imagine so much of what is not shown.  This restraint is crucial, and it holds through to the end.  The epilogue is magnificent because even though it makes sense, exactly what has happened remains a mystery.  The story is not necessarily over, and the lingering ambiguity is tantalizing in the extreme.  Sometimes the most spine-chilling thing of all is not knowing.