REVIEW: The Babadook (2013, Dir. Jennifer Kent)

Horror doesn't affect me. I make a point of not letting it happen. I was a very, very impressionable child. A Nightmare on Elm Street kept me awake for years. I still freak myself out, even now, if I'm up in the middle of the night and I let my mind wander back to that time, so I'm obviously still susceptible.

For my own peace of mind, I fight horror film makers. I've made a point of doing so since about the age of 16. I very consciously pick apart their films when I'm watching them. I stubbornly refuse to be drawn in. I nimbly diffuse their tricks as I watch. The last horror that got under my skin was Jeepers Creepers; that'll give you a clue as to how well I have honed my horror deconstruction abilities. Besides, modern horror is a cinch, since gore is no problem for me. It's easily distanced.

Traditional, atmospheric horror, though... there can sometimes be trouble. The Babadook caused trouble.

I didn't think it would at first. Writer/director Jennifer Kent's film sets off with an unsteady gait, stiffly accented and consciously acted. But Kent throws directly into a tight psycho-sexual drama and as she slowly expands her audience's frame of reference, her film finds its footing to frightening effect. Disconcertingly, Kent never provides a clear angle on the source of the ever-congealing danger that strangles the lives of her two protagonists, Amelia (Essie Davis), a matted-haired single mother, and Samuel (Noah Wiseman), her a slappable five-year-old son. It'd be convenient to lay the blame on the traumatising pop-up book, 'Mr. Babadook', which mysteriously works its way into their bedtime reading regime, but like most of the tension in the lives of the mismatched pair, the book only feels like a manifestation of a bigger issue: the violent death of Amelia's husband in the moments before Samuel's birth.

Navigating a life without her husband, with a son she both loves and resents, fixating on loss at the same time as forcing herself to compartmentalise it, Amelia is not in a good place. Who is a woman in her situation to be? She is buffeted by expectations, from her sister, from her neighbour, from her son's school, from Children's Services, from the television. A well-meaning jibe from her workmate (a brief cameo from Snowtown's Daniel Henshall) would have her chained to the kitchen sink, and it is no coincidence that Kent's screenplay locates her terror in the domestic environment.

Davis feeds off the initial uncertainty in the The Babadook's tone. She grows into Amelia's fidgety, wit-frayed persona, her jagged performance made ever more convincing by the elemental presence of her young co-star. Wiseman has a piercing set of tonsils and a presence demandingly reminiscent of David Bennet's brattish Oskar in Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum. His persistent affections claw at Amelia's heartstrings, insisting that she love him. He is a terrorising id, unconstrainable, hacking together makeshift weapons to use in his increasingly violent efforts to protect her from the unseen enemy. Unseen, or unrecognised.

Genre references abound and Kent regularly reaches into the horror toolbox to furnish her scares, which would generally inoculate me from the terror, but here the extremity of the emotional setup cuts through the film-craft an adds a disturbingly visceral element, which Davis sells completely. Amelia's psychological desperation, her sexual guilt and her fractured maternal instincts stab viscously into her mind and pull her into darker and darker territory. The intensity psychological drama exacerbates The Babadook's ability to scar.

Amelia is isolated but Kent makes sure to let us know that she is not alone; she swirls in a televisual roll-call of cultural reference points: those late night ads of big busted women sprawling themselves over 1-800 numbers, 'Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo' and, most pointedly, Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera, one of cinema's most emblematic representations of a women tethered to the service of a man by fear and love. The interplay between instinct and oppression is laid thickly over Amelia and Sam's relationship, just as it is over the relationship of Amelia and her dead husband. Whether this shrouds the ultimate source of their supernatural interloper is left satisfyingly (and fear-perputuatingly) open to interpretation.

Horror fans will have no problem with Kent. The Babadook is a traditional horror, working off well-worn technique that signals clearly enough when the audience should whip itself into a frenzy of communal fear. But strip back the entertainment and Kent's film grapples with thematic material much more terrifying and more disturbingly intangible than her top-hatted terror. It will stick on both counts. A superb achievement for this low budget chiller.

★★★★

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