Movie review 'The Babadook': A freaky affair

It kept going, and I kept watching and it started to sink in: I wasn’t really irritated so much as creeped out. This film was getting under my skin.

The Babadook is the feature debut from Australian director Jennifer Kent, and it is made with such style and such originality, Kent will no doubt be given the opportunity to direct many more films, with much larger budgets.

This is the scariest movie of the year. In fact, as someone who has developed a pretty thick Critic’s Shield from years of watching standard haunted-house/possessed human/mythological-creature fare, I have to say I was genuinely freaked out by some of the passages in The Babadook.

Amelia (Essie Davis) is a widow who works in a depressing nursing home and lives in a ramshackle house with her six-year-old son, Sam (Noah Wiseman).

The boy is a precocious and clingy little bugger prone to hugging Mommy too tightly at children’s birthday parties, terrorising other children with scary stories and sometimes with physical aggression, and violent mood swings.

One night Sam finds an oversized storybook titled “Mister Babadook” in the house, and he insists Mommy read it to him. Big mistake. Huge.

Illustrated in ominous tones of black and white, with just a line or two of type on each page, the pop-up book tells the tale of a monstrous, shadowy, top hat-wearing creature with skull-like features and long talons.

“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook,” we’re told, and with each turn of the page, Amelia is increasingly disturbed, while Sam seems ever more intrigued. Amelia stops reading and places the book high atop an armoire and out of sight, but Sam is already obsessed with the Babadook. The next day and every day thereafter, he’ll tell anyone he encounters about the Babadook.

So here we are. A single mother still haunted by the tragic death of her husband on the day her son was born. A child whose “acting out” has reached the stage where his aunt says she won’t come to the house anymore because she can’t stand being around her own nephew. And a mysterious creature that lives in the shadows of the house or maybe only in the psyche of the mother. Or the son. Or both. You could wear out a therapist’s couch with all the psychological undertones.

Amelia finds shards of glass in her soup, but not in Sam’s. She destroys the book but apparently the book can’t be destroyed. She goes to the police, but of course they don’t believe her. The moment Amelia looks around the police station, feeling the stare of every cop in the room, is one of countless, perfectly framed shots by Kent. Everything from the visit to the police station to a drive down a quiet residential street to a little girl’s birthday party is fraught with tension. Something always feels just a little ... off.

As for the usual scary movie questions e.g., why don’t they just leave the house suffice to say Kent has an answer at every turn. The Babadook is the kind of next-level horror movie where just because it’s daylight, that doesn’t mean the scary stuff ends and all is well until the sun goes down again.