‘You can’t get rid of the Babadook…’
When I first saw The Babadook back in 2014, I was puzzled by all the praise it had received. Watching the film again as the father of a two year old, working in a much more stressful job than I had back then (oh, how I miss bar work), and having experienced the loss of several friends and family, I now took something from The Babadook that I never had before. On first viewing, I was disappointed that the titular villain hardly appears and is fairly cartoonish when he does. While I understood that the film was a metaphor for depression first time around, I couldn’t empathise with that sentiment. How wrong I was…
Amelia Vanek (Essie Davis) is the mother to Samuel (Noah Wiseman), a troubled and imaginative child who continually gets himself into bother. When she happens across an odd looking fairy-tale book on Samuel’s bookshelf, she soon realises that the book, and especially its titular character, are having an adverse impact on her son.
The thing that makes The Babadook so effective is the escalation. When we first meet Amelia, she is struggling but just about clinging on. As the film progresses and her crippling depression becomes more and more pronounced, we watch as she slowly loses her grip on reality and succumbs to the blackness that seems to be stalking both her and her son. While the Babadook itself is a compelling visual creation, the most frightening moments here are what Amelia inadvertently does when in the throes of a depressive episode. Her violent fantasies and wild overreactions will be familiar to any struggling parent, and this makes it all the more astonishing that writer-director Jennifer Kent is not a mother herself. Her depiction of motherhood, grief and parenting in general is so spookily accurate that it seems almost unbelievable that she is not expressing first hand experiences. It helps that Davis delivers an all-timer horror performance, inspiring both empathy and disgust in equal measure, and also that the film is beautifully lit in arresting chiaroscuro lighting by Radek Ładczuk (working on his first English-language film).
The Babadook, along with IT Follows, ushered in the prestige era of horror that eventually led to films such as Hereditary and Get Out, and while the trope of horror being a metaphor for something else (usually grief) has become overused, this film retains its dark power – an important and era-defining horror film.
