Movie Review: 'The Babadook'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Here's a horror thriller that's more interested in creeping us out than grossing us out, more interested in making us squirm than making us gawk, more interested in unnerving than unleashing.
It's an intense and disturbing supernatural home-invasion drama called The Babadook, it comes by way of Australia, and it's one of those things that go bump in the night.
Essie Davis plays Amelia, a single-mom nurse who's still devastated and haunted by the car-crash death of her husband while they were en route to the hospital to give birth to her son, Samuel, played as a soon-to-be-seven-year-old by Noah Wiseman, a nervous child who has trouble sleeping because he's afraid that there's a monster in his room.
Samuel is a demanding and mischievous and difficult kid, to be sure, which doesn't help his mother's fatigue or her loneliness as she essentially sleepwalks through her maternal duties.
But what gets his put-upon mother's disapproving attention of late is a playfully spooky kids' pop-up picture book, Mr Babadook, that she's never noticed before and that has turned up in his bookshelf. In it, a menacing creature called The Babadook makes rhyming threats. Samuel wants to read it even though it scares him and shakes up Amelia.
But throwing it out or even ripping it up doesn't actually get rid of it.
Is Samuel imagining the monster or is there actually one there? And is Amelia having hallucinations because she's both stressed and depressed or is there a really sinister presence in their home?
In other words, should we be taking all this stuff literally or figuratively? Answer: maybe both.
Debuting writer-director Jennifer Kent, basing the film on a short of hers called Monster, maintains the mood masterfully and keeps the levels of tension and ambiguity – and consequent suspense – high, giving us a genuinely horrific and unsettling drama from the "less is more" school of horror, one that evokes primal fears. Viewers may find themselves returning home after seeing it and checking under their beds and behind closed doors a lot more thoroughly than they usually do.
Davis and Wiseman are exceptional in what is essentially a two-hander, allowing us to root for both characters even when they're at their obnoxious worst, as they battle not only shared loss and grief but disagreement and disgust with, to say nothing of disappointment in, each other, while we ride a rollercoaster of feelings about the two focal characters.
So we'll scare up 3 stars out of 4 for an emotionally and psychologically resonant horror piece and family drama. The Babadook, by hook or by crook, leaves us shook.
