Because it hides amorphous behind so many masks, no bogeyman is outgrown by its tormented. The Babadook, Jennifer Kent’s brilliant debut as director, appears latched to this idea of everyday phantoms which on every level is true. It opens with a sequence in which Amelia (Essie Davis, literally floating in abyss), is jolt awake from the recurring nightmare of the car incident that widowed and left her to single-parent her son Sam (Noah Wiseman) who has mildly aggressive anxieties. And when the frame sweeps by her eyes, dead and over again with resentment and regret, it becomes clear that the film creeps beyond what terror a book character is capable of inducing.
But then, no such discussion will be inspired if we looked strictly at the film’s plot, which is familiar and rote: a single mother and her son haunted by an endlessly creepy children’s book, inexplicably found on the son’s shelf. “You can’t get rid of the Babadook,” it says, and it is clear that it does not mean the monster exactly, but what the monster represents. It can be fear as much as it can be grief, because it is indeed a bogeyman who accepts no riddance and only takes other forms. For Amelia, however, it is both fear and grief: fear of raising an indifferent child; and grief of – no matter the seven years of trying to cope with – having lost her husband.
Kent, being female, knows the hardships of a woman, especially in Amelia’s heart-breaking circumstance; and being a discerning filmmaker, she speaks so fluently cinematically, so graceful in ravelling the widening fissures of her humanity and, eventually, sense of self. Mister Babadook, monstrous entity or figment of the imagination, is a looking glass directly into the dread Amelia harbours. She bears the resentment and hurt of Margaret White under the frailty and warmth of Rosemary Woodhouse – both women (respectively from De Palma’s Carrie and Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby) whose crises are compressed into a character that perfectly resonates womanhood in a fulcrum carrying love and hate in-between.
Yet this is not telling that The Babadook is not much of a horror film just that it revolves around and latched on its strong emotional core. It is certainly fist-clenching and relentlessly terrifying.
Like Wolf Creek (from fellow Australian director Greg McLean), a film that overturns expectations when it plays as a rich road-trip drama, The Babadook remains grounded on insistent genre conventions. Lights flicker, disturbing noises, heard (ba–baa–baa…dook! Dook-doooook!); things go bump at night. It is not meant to overturn these conventions, but rise beyond them. The story, anchored by Kent’s deft direction and Davis’ and Wiseman’s terrific portrayals, borders by hyperrealism but holds on to much ambiguity. Toward the credits, the thought lingers on whether Mister Babadook indeed trespassed Amelia’s home or is just a demented representation of her crises and anxieties.
More than a thorough technician – the film is never a single frame shy of intrigue, from smart composition to skilful sound design – Kent is also an empathetic woman, who captures the hardships of single-motherhood; thus arriving with a story as heart-breaking as it is unflinchingly eerie — and no less bracing.
THE BABADOOK
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THE BABADOOK
Jennifer Kent / AUS / 2014
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Screenplay: Jennifer Kent
Cast: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman…
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“Don’t let him in! Don’t let him in!
Don’t let him in!”
~Sam (Noah Wiseman)
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