'The Babadook' - Review

Single mother Amelia (Essie Davis) is haunted: the memory of her husband’s violent death and her son’s fascination with – and terror of – monsters keeps her awake at night and plagues her every waking moment. In an attempt to placate her son (Noah Wiseman), she agrees to read him a story before bed, and he pulls The Babadook from the shelf. Far from calming him, the frightening images from the pop-up book begin to infuse themselves in his mind and a sinister presence begins to leak into the house.

What sets The Babadook (from Australian director Jennifer Kent) apart from a shockingly large chunk of modern horror is the emphasis on character. Sure, mainstream schlock like the Insidious movies pertains to be about the struggle of the family, but the characters are paper-thin. Not so with The Babadook. The entire film is set in the company of two people who are completely dependent upon each other but increasingly frightened of. In fact, as the house goes dark and the eerie presence rolls in, we often wonder if the mother is more frightened of the Babadook apparition or her son. Davis’ performance is sublime, as is Wiseman as the child who resents the confines of the house yet feels out of touch and alone in the outside world. These are characters that you genuinely care about, that you want to escape the clammy hands of terror.

The house in question – as everything starts to go downhill – feels more and more like something out of the mind of Tim Burton; a creaky, groaning melange of drab greys and pitch blacks that contributes to the atmosphere with a feeling of implacable inescapability. The irritating greyish colour filter has latched on from the rest of modern horror, and is completely un-necessary: I think the set design by itself could handle the colour element. The pop-up book manages to be the creepiest thing in the film, and the fact that we’ve already seen most of it within trailers and promotional material is testament to its originality.

As far as the scares go, that’s kind of it. While I applaud the film for neglecting the ‘quiet…quiet…quiet…BANG’ sensibility of every other horror movie currently haunting the multiplexes, I wish there had been more scares. There are spine-chilling moments, a reliance on what you don’t see, and a wonderfully-crafted selection of practical special effects, but the film is too light on anything truly terrifying or shocking to leave any lasting effect. The image of the pop-up book will remain, but nothing beyond that bears enough malice or hits hard enough to linger.

Though I readily attest that the film works best when focusing on the central fractured relationship (and falls apart somewhat when the focus shifts to side characters that bear no real weight), it is worth noting that it spends so long doing so that there is very little time left to enforce any sense of real horror or dread. The idea of a monster hiding under the bed or in your wardrobe is nothing new, and I don’t feel that the movie does enough with that idea to justify having it as the foundation for most of the ‘scary’ scenes.

Admirable perhaps more for its ambition than its ability to scare, The Babadook is not a failure: the central relationship is believable and the premise is strong, but in attempting to handle complex emotional distress, the fear of the dark and even a look back to the birth of cinema, the limited running time leaves little room for the crucial horror element.  

★★★☆☆