Past Misdeeds: The Babadook (2014)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Amelia (Essie Davis), widowed and quite isolated from the rest of the world ever since her husband died in an accident while driving her to the hospital when she was in labour, lives alone with her little son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Even more than six years after her husband’s death, Amelia has still not managed to really cope with it, finding herself alone and with a difficult child, her main human contacts being a pretty horrible rich girl friend, her elderly neighbour, and a colleague at work whose obvious interest in her she can’t or won’t notice. Her situation certainly isn’t improved by a shit job as a nurse for the sick and elderly, by the fact that Samuel has major behavioural problems nobody seems to bother to actually treat (his school’s only answer to the problems is wanting to pull him out of class and into one-to-one-tutoring, as if the concepts of child psychiatry and psychology had never been invented), and by Amelia’s own untreated mental health problems.

Right now, things are bad, and the cracks in Amelia’s and Samuel’s life are beginning to grow too large to just ignore, but the true downward spiral starts when Amelia reads a children’s pop-up picture book she doesn’t remember buying at all to the always over-anxious and over-imaginative Samuel . “The Babadook” as it is called, frightens Samuel to death. He becomes convinced the book’s titular monster is lurking in their home, meaning them ill. This does of course make his behavioural troubles even worse, which in turn worsens Amelia’s psychological deterioration, until she too begins to encounter strange and inexplicable things. It might be a shared delusion, it might be a big fat metaphor for child abuse, or it might be that something truly horrible has stepped into lives that weren’t all that happy to begin with.

There’s really little else I can do when confronted with as individual, clever, ambiguous and strange a horror movie as Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook than lavish it with praise. Sure, from time to time, if you want to, you can see the film’s probably miniscule budget showing. However that’s really only something that applies when you look for the signs of it, for The Babadook is a film finely focused on what it can do instead of attempting those things it can’t afford to.

So it only features a handful of actors, but all of them are great – with Essie Davis giving an absolutely outstanding tour de force performance that is utterly convincing even in her most violent mood swings and never ever feels like the actress just showing off, and Noah Wiseman really managing to at once make his Samuel so believably exhausting it’s no wonder Amelia has difficulties coping even ignoring her copious other problems, yet also making believable the boy’s joy, his love for his mother and his sadness, turning what could be caricatures in lesser hands into people.

Kent does some fantastic things with her basic set-up, not only keeping the outward truth of what we see in the film ambiguous but also making its supernatural (or not) elements so meaningful and expressive of a lot of things – like the kind of negative feelings towards their children parents aren’t allowed to admit, the slowly growing resentment coming from a life that went off the rails one day and never got back there, with little visible opportunity for things turning around, the fear of losing one’s child as well as that of losing one’s mind, and so on - their actual reality inside the film’s real world seems to be beside the point. And we’re not talking about the horrors of allegory here, where everything has to have a specific meaning and no thought needs to be put into establishing the world surrounding the allegory as believable, but the point where a film’s constructed reality becomes so easy to accept, several completely divergent interpretations of what’s going on in it can be true at the same time, characters locking their horrors up in the cellar and feeding it worms being real and a metaphor at the same time, one way of looking at it actually strengthening the other.

Kent never makes a false step throughout the whole of the movie, neither on the directing nor on the writing side, presenting the illogical and the strange as a (un)natural part of the film’s world, setting up terrific moments of suspense and executing them just as brilliantly, as if this were the easiest thing in the world. Even more impressive, Kent, in her first feature film, already has a visual language all her own, most probably based on a deep knowledge of the horror films that came before, but feeling characteristic, personal, and completely disinterested in using the horror film techniques that are in fashion when they don’t fit the situation at all. Consequently, jump scares are replaced with a creeping dread, and mood and suspense become supremely important.


I’m also very, very fond of The Babadook’s clever use of special effects that is - not just in the monster design - influenced by the expressionist silent films it very expressly champions (as well as by Edward Gorey, I suspect). And how often can you say a phrase like this about a film and not mean “Tim Burton Gothic” (not that I have much against Burton, traitor against opinions I’m supposed to have that I am) but – again – something that seems much more to be part of a personal vision?