The Babadook review – you’ll scare because you care
“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook...” While the quiet-quiet-BANG shocks of “cattle-prod” cinema continue to scare up big bucks in a wearyingly predictable horror market, how terrific to find a crowd-pleasing chiller that wants to do more than make you jump – to move your heart and your head, rather than just your body. Which is not to suggest that this Australian gem, which builds upon writer-director Jennifer Kent’s startling short Monster, is in any way lacking in the fear factor; on the contrary, there’s plenty here to make your skin crawl, your pulse quicken and the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention. But Kent’s nightmarish fairytale about enchanted books and accursed dreams works its frightful magic through our emotional engagement with its characters. To borrow a line from Pixar’s Monsters Inc: “We scare because we care.”
Essie Davis stars as traumatised single mom Amelia, haunted by memories of her husband’s death in a car crash en route to the maternity ward. Six years after the accident, troubled young son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) is struggling with demons of his own, obsessed by the spectral monsters he sees lurking in every shadow, against whose creepy advances he has fashioned a series of homemade weapons.
When Sam asks Amelia to read him a bedtime story, she finds a previously unseen volume on his shelf, a pop-up book of an extremely Grimm nature (think a kids’ version of the flesh-bound volume from The Evil Dead) about the bat-like Mister Babadook – a cross between Max Schreck’s Nosferatu and The League of Gentleman’s Papa Lazarou – who gives both mother and child the creeps. Attempts to lose, hide or even burn the offending volume prove fruitless, and soon both Amelia and Sam are seeing – and hearing – the distinctive “Ba-Ba-DOOK” everywhere; a hideous stranger in their increasingly haunted house.
An actor-turned-film-maker who cites a stint on the set of Lars von Trier’s Dogville as “my film school”, Kent’s first feature as writer-director is both fiercely original and richly genre-literate. Alongside Dreyer, Polanski, Franju, Lynch, Carpenter and del Toro, all of whom the film-maker has named as inspirational (her knowledge of horror is enthusiastically thorough), there are echoes of the more nightmarish end of Tim Burton’s animations, the use of in-camera stop-motion effects breathing brilliantly mechanical life into the pop-up titular character. The colour palette is equally precise – washed-out blues and expressionist blacks recalling the tinted monochromes of early cinema (Georges Méliès casts a significant shadow). Kent works closely with director of photography Radek Ladczuk to create a timeless, mythical world within the suburbs of modern Adelaide.
As for the Babadook, he’s descended from the same nursery rhyme gene pool as Freddy Krueger (and by extension the Struwwelpeters and Scissormen of Heinrich Hoffmann), invoked by childish verse, feeding upon the guilty fears of parents. And it is here that the film’s real power resides – in its depiction of Amelia’s projection of her own paranoias on to the child. When she looks at Sam, she sees her dead husband; no wonder the kid looks so scared. Like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (and thereafter Jack Clayton’s The Innocents), the real focus here is not the supernaturally afflicted child but the psychologically disquieted adult.
What an interesting double bill this would make with Lynne Ramsay’s provocative We Need to Talk About Kevin, which similarly addresses the taboo subject of maternal paedophobia, albeit from a less fantastical viewpoint. There’s a hint, too, of the protective melancholia of Hideo Nakata’s spine-tingling Dark Water, from which Kent’s multilayered fable borrows both its heartrending theme and ultimate resolution; a strange and terrifying world, seen through the eyes of a mother whom Kent, in an interview, tellingly described as “drowning”.
For all its eerie visual prowess and assured storytelling skill, none of this would work had Kent not been blessed with such believable leads from whom she draws terrifically nuanced performances. With his cowled eyes and pallid skin, young Noah Wiseman combines the plucky spark of Phantasm’s Michael Baldwin with the haunted gaze of The Hills Have Eyes’ Michael Berryman – a figure of both pity and fear who inspires wildly contradictory impulses in his tormented mother. Sam may be a “problem child” but the real problem lies elsewhere. Essie Davis, the award-winning stage actress and screen regular, turns in a haunted mother performance to rival Belén Rueda in The Orphanage or Nicole Kidman in The Others. It is through her eyes that we experience the narrative’s descent into madness, and it’s to her credit that the film remains so firmly grounded in recognisable human emotions even as the fabulist elements rage and reign. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, this is a tale of two worlds – the incarnate and the imagined – and Davis’s responses make both seem equally “real” and equally alarming.
By hook or by crook, don’t miss The Babadook.