The Babadook is real

Rating: 6/10 (22 January 2017)

This is a movie I've wanted to see since it came out as it looked to be a fresh take on horror. In the trailers, the Babadook struck me as a terrifying new bogeyman sprung from some collective children's nightmare or the frightened child in us all. The first act of the film is great. It's got the spooky, misunderstood kid, the stressed out single mom barely holding it together and a sickening sense of their household inexorably slipping into the supernatural. The best scenes are where the mother reads from the mysterious children's book to her son about the Babadook and quickly realizes that she has unwittingly (or perhaps not so unwittingly) let a demonic force into their lives. The book itself is a delightfully dark and fiendishly clever creation, and one thinks, a building block for a Freddy-type franchise. (In fact, I would rate the book 10 stars, the movie 5.)
But then the movie turns inward and the mother becomes possessed by the Babadook, so for a long stretch we no longer see the entity. Instead we see the mother in the grips of possession. While this makes sense psychologically, watching someone being controlled by a demonic force is depressingly familiar territory. And watching a once-loving mother act abusively towards her small child is not only monotonous, it's not my idea of entertainment. The arty, ambiguous ending provides a lot of food for thought, though it will undoubtedly disappoint hardcore horror fans.
There's a lot of talk on the message board about whether the Babadook is indeed real or whether it's all in the mother and child's heads. There are good arguments on both sides, but I do believe it's real, if for no other reason than there's a lot of money to be made in potential Babadook sequels.