'The Babadook' A Review

The Babadook is an Australian psychological horror movie about an overwhelmed widow and her troubled son. Amelia(Essie Davis) is the exhausted mother of Sam(Noah Wiseman) her aggressive monster obsessed child. The specter of Sam's father who died in a car accident the night he was born hangs over the both of them and the film as a whole. Because of Sam's pathological fear of monsters both he and Amelia suffer from insomnia. One night Sam chooses a book for Amelia to read that she doesn't recognize called "Mister Babadook" about a boogieman that haunts a house and threatens the boy that lives there. After reading the book a presence starts to infiltrate their lives.

The majority of the film Davis and Wiseman are the only ones onscreen. They both give incredible performances, Davis is emotional, subtle, vulnerable, and volatile. Wiseman goes places we rarely see children go on film- he is unlikable borderline disturbing. The relationship, though strained and clearly unhealthy, is effective, we know they love each other in their own distorted ways, we are drawn in.

The Babadook serves not only as a literal supernatural terror but also as a metaphor for Amelia's unresolved grief and her resentment towards her son. On it's own the sequences with the Babadook are frightening, with almost none of the gore or jump-out scares that dominate modern horror but with an eerie insect like score, slow deliberate suspense, and shadowy disturbing imagery. The psychological issues plaguing Amelia and Sam also create an impending sense of doom. The audience, like the characters, feel emotionally exhausted and smothered.

The film is beautifully and elegantly shot, the first horror film in resent memory to shoot a monster in a  truly real and visceral way. There is almost no music in the score it is all atonal insectine scratches, rasps and groans which utterly and completely pull us in. The technical elements of the film harmonize to make us feel as trapped and hopeless as Amelia is.

Easily the best horror movie of the 21st century, genuinely terrifying, not for the faint of heart.

See It.