Movie Review: The Babadook.

If it's in a word, or in a look, this film might have worked better as a book...

 I've been looking forward to Australian horror movie The Babadook ever since I came across the impressively creepy trailer. For those unaware, a single mother with a problem child stumbles across a strange book ("Mr. Babadook") and after reading it, begins to suspect that the monster her son is obsessed with might not be imaginary.

 And it isn't. Except it is. Look, here's the problem: the opening two thirds of this film were great. Forgoing the normal horror movie rhythm of quiet moments interspersed with jump scares, the film is one long, tense, sustained note of dread and simmering madness. Or it is until it gets stupid.

 Generally speaking I try not to put spoilers in film reviews, but I really don't think I can talk about The Babadook without discussing the last act. So, if you want to drop out now and judge for yourself, all I'll say is that I'd give it three out of five, points for effort, and label it an interesting failure.




...still with me? Good.

 As single mum Amelia becomes more sleep deprived and stressed by her son's behaviour, she begins hallucinating Mister Babadook in the shadows everywhere she looks. In probably the creepiest scene, she lies in bed, terrified, as the Babadook slowly eases open the bedroom door, skittering into the room as a jerky, stop-motion hybrid of ventriloquist doll, serial killer, insect and mammal.


 Sadly, this is also the scene where everything goes to shit, as the Babadook possesses Amelia and she begins to grow increasingly hostile to her already problematic son. Which isn't bad, as horror plots go, except that we already saw "haunted parent goes mad" done in The Shining. It would be wrong to say The Babadook is derivative, but it's definitely fair to say its influences are on show. What really lets it down, however, is thuddingly heavy-handed symbolism and a devotion to its own metaphors above plot coherence.

 The only way to make this film scary, frankly, would be to have Amelia kill her son at the climax. Instead, the son fights back with home made weapons that briefly take us entirely out of the horror genre and into a Home Alone movie. Demon-possessed mothers trying to stab their children don't normally feature in scenes that draw laughs from an audience, but damned if people weren't giggling in the screening I saw.

 Eventually, Amelia overcomes the Babadook's hold on her and in the process, learns to protect her son. Because, in case the film didn't make it abundantly clear already (and fuck me, did it), The Babadook is an expression of her repressed grief over the death of her husband and her resentment of her son. This is spelled out when, finally confronting the Babadook, Amelia is made to live out the moment of her husband's death again. Which is already un-subtle from a story point of view, but becomes outright naff when bad CGI is employed for no real reason.

 The film then takes another unexpected turn when the Babadook goes to live in the basement. Yes, really. No, I don't know why, either. One minute the Babadook is an analogy for fear and repression, the next it's a real creature, and even the film makers themselves can't decide which is the case, so eventually settle for having it live in the protagonist's basement and fed on worms from the garden. Again, I'm not making that up. We get a happy ending in which Amelia learns to get over the loss of her husband and rebuild her relationship with her son, but also has to feed the monster in her basement. Which is yet another representation of her buried emotions. Except it's not, because it's a literal monster she has to feed, because this whole film can't quite get the hang of metaphor.

 Horror is always difficult to pitch correctly. Too subtle and the audience may not cotton on, too bold and things get trashy. In the case of The Babadook, however, what should have been subtle themes are instead used to bludgeon the audience over the head. It's possible that a longer run time may have given the eerie, nauseous qualities that are present in the first half more time to breathe and resulted in a better film. It may even have worked better as a TV series, giving time for the Babadook itself to be more ambiguous, the slide into madness much slower.

 As it stands, however, the film is ultimately a great buildup to what feels like a rushed, histrionic finale that never quite trusts its audience's intelligence.