By Keri O’Shea
Amelia (Essie Davis) is a woman for whom the cliche ‘on the edge’ barely even covers it. A single mother whose partner died taking her to the hospital to give birth to their son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), she has in the nearly-seven years since then barely really existed; she holds down a job, but just, and maintains a relationship with her sister, but again – only just. The reason for this seems to be that her little boy has more or less driven away every sane adult in her life, and of the ones that are left, most of them are getting towards the point of open revolt. See, there’s a lot of terminology to explain Samuel’s type of behaviour, all of which still make me want to gently remove my uterus and bury it somewhere – as whatever you want to call it, it manifests as constant back-chat, aggressive conduct with other kids, and most wearyingly for mum, an obsession with ‘monsters’ which drives him to make his own weapons, like some sort of Satanic spin on Home Alone, leading him to getting into constant trouble at school whilst jeopardising Amelia’s (probably poorly-paid) job, as she has to go and collect him and/or smooth several situations over on a regular basis. She’s not sleeping, barely eating, and his upcoming birthday only serves as a mean-spirited reminder of what she lost when he came into the world. Parent or no parent, it’s hard not to sympathise with this exhausted lady whose son rides rough-shod over her as a human being, harping on the same idea over and over again and insisting she reads him more stories which fuel his imagination even more and worsens the situation at home.
The first element of horror in The Babadook is, then, utterly mundane, relating to social isolation and the bleak downside of raising a child, but believe me, it’s no less effective for that. A turning-point occurs fairly early in, however – when Samuel requests (and is of course granted) a story, and as usual, Amelia selects a book from their shelf. Its title is The Babadook: funnily enough, Amelia doesn’t recognise the book, and as the story progresses, she finds herself growing more and more uneasy at its escalatingly violent content. She refuses to read on – but Samuel is already obsessed with the Babadook creature as described, and oddly, something about the character makes a bleary-eyed Amelia fixate on it, too. Is she just losing her mind? Because strange things start to happen, both at home and outside, and it seems that the story’s promise that ‘if it’s in a word, or in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook’ may ring true after all…
An effective set-up and the slow drip-drip-drip of odd phenomena (director and writer Jennifer Kent certainly understands that less is more) means that, for the first half of the film, this figured as one of the most effective and yes, scary features I’d seen in a long while. The Babadook mostly avoids the tired old routine so beloved of modern multiplex horrors, i.e. to make you jump out of your seat at least once every five minutes or else ostensibly fail as a frightening story; this has little to do with genuine scares and more to do with tinkering with your reflexes, and I can quite happily do without it. That isn’t an issue here, and things are far more unsettling when you, like Amelia, might or might not have glimpsed something there…and the Babadook itself is barely-seen, unless in partial darkness, which allows the imagination to kick in. More like this, please. Fear of the dark is alive and well in this film. Furthermore, the net effect of these incidents on Amelia is very interesting; during the course of the movie, she and Samuel effectively change roles, so that he’s the rational and forward-thinking member of the household, whilst mum descends into fright, then petulance – and worse. After wanting to throttle the little sod when I first encountered him here, after a while you start to see Sam’s perspective – of adults as scary – at least as scary, statuesque and malignant as anything from his picture books. It’s a clever about-face and the performance of the two lead actors has to be as strong as it is to achieve it.
However, this phenomenally powerful build-up does begin to falter somewhat as the film moves closer to its resolution. One of the reasons for that, I believe, is that the set-up gets through a lot of its more ambiguous moments early on, and in order to move forward to some sort of closure to the story then it needs must change tack, with more of overt, high action taking place on-screen and less left to the imagination. It’s hard to imagine a way out of this which would have rounded out the tale in an engaging way, in fairness, though I’m sure it could have been done. The second reason, though, relates to the nature of the exposition itself, and I’m reluctant to discuss it here, as to do so would almost certainly spoiler the film – but basically, the film reveals a metaphorical element to the goings-on, and this is hammered home pretty hard. The Babadook remains engaging throughout, fair enough, but in the last thirty minutes or so, I did feel like some of the spelling-out could have been omitted and the audience could have been trusted to decipher the plot a little more independently. But then, that’s the potential risk of starting so strong…
The Babadook made a lot of people’s top films lists at the end of 2014, and despite some issues, it is deservedly so. It’s a film which meshes the real and the unreal in a very scary way, and as it makes Amelia act like a kid again, so it does the audience – jumping at shadows, doubting their own eyes and cowering from the superhuman baddie on the screen. Playing hell with the seemingly magic power of stories is something this film shows it can do over and over, whilst never neglecting the fact that adult life, with all its vulnerabilities and concerns, can be a pretty scary place too.
The Babadook is available on DVD and Blu-ray from today (16th February 2015), from Icon.