The Babadook

Saturated with dread and genuinely unsettling, Australian director Jennifer Kent's first feature The Babadook is an elegant little horror film reminiscent of Roman Polanski's "apartment trilogy" -- Repulsion (1965), Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976) -- albeit minus Polanski's kinky male gaze. It is the sort of thing that stays with you for a while, possibly for quite a while, and even as I write this review I recognize that it's possible I've slightly underrated it. That hardly seems to matter -- this is a movie that will have its advocates and champions and will make its way onto critics' end-of-the-year lists. People who like this sort of thing will find this movie.

It feels familiar in its early scenes that establish the dysfunctionality and explicate the primal wounds of a little broken family. Amelia (Essie Davis) is a young single mother trying to hold it together. We meet her starting from a nightmare in which she imagines the death of her husband, who was killed in a car wreck while on the way to the hospital to witness the birth of their son Sam (Noah Wiseman). Sam is now 6 years old, burdened with a birthday that stirs unhappy memories in his mum. No wonder he's a maladjusted little heathen, a terror at school who's obsessed with building elaborate weapons to protect himself and his mother from the monster that haunts his dreams. No wonder Amelia, who works a grim job as a nursing home caregiver, looks drawn and tired, with a thousand-yard stare that suggests post-traumatic stress disorder.

Only Amelia's stress is ongoing. Though she's trying hard to be a good mother, Sam has a knack for saying the wrongest thing possible. (When the social worker's around, he complains about the drugs he's given to help him sleep.) He imagines monsters that he might slaughter. This is not the sort of household into which anyone should introduce a pop-up storybook about a monster who is summoned when you learn of him. (Why is this book in their house? There are more than a few subtle clues.)

Once Sam has given the monster a palpable shape and name -- the Babadook -- he's all the more real to him. And soon Amelia suspects that her son is actually manufacturing evidence of the monster. But the Babadook has gotten into her head as well. And while the movie is beautifully ambiguous on the question of whether the monster is an actual supernatural being or the product of mental illness -- or perhaps a Jungian shadow self, a repressed part of the mind -- there's never any doubt that the danger is real.

Set primarily in a creaky old house, the film plays with traditional horror tropes such as wary pets, demonic children, doors that mysteriously open and close and other things that go bump in the night. As it moves along, the camera's formal compositions begin to tilt and skew in sympathy with the disordering of Amelia's suffering mind. Meanwhile the television flickers with Georges Melies' gray reveries and Mario Bava's colorful horrors as Amelia endures another sleepless night.

Davis' calibrated performance as the coming-apart Amelia is nuanced and shattering, recalling Mia Farrow in the aforementioned Rosemary's Baby and Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Kent, who first explored this material in the 2005 short Monster (which I've posted on the blood, dirt & angels blog: blooddirtangels.com), has made a first-rate scary movie, one that holds up with the genre's classics.

MovieStyle on 12/19/2014