2014's two most annoying characters

Rating: 4/10 (5 December 2014)

I really should stop taking Joseph Morgenstern (the Wall Street Journal's elderly movie critic) seriously. It's clear he tends to overpraise "little" films, low-budget films, especially when, as in this case, he's inexplicably smitten with the lead actress. He certainly steered me wrong on this one.
Essie Davis, the actress in question, has had a pretty impressive career during which she's played everything from a farm wife to a flapper detective, but here she turns in a really irritating, relentlessly one-note performance -- at least for the first half of the film. (In the second half, she turns in an only-slightly-less-irritating performance on a different single note; see below.)
As a widow saddled with a particularly uncute, neurotic,perpetually nagging seven-year-old son, Davis keeps her face frozen ina single expression, that of a Brave Little Martyr who's barely coping with the awfulness of her life; with her heavy-lidded eyes and (so it seems) lack of makeup, she always looks as if she's either about to cry or has just finished crying. In every scene -- I mean absolutely every friggin' scene -- she has loose, unkempt strands of hair hanging off the side of her face and a wisp or two over her eyes; you want to yell, "For Chrissake, comb your hair! Pull your damned hair out of your eyes!" Clearly that's the director's way of never letting you forget, even for a second, that Davis is supposed to be a Frazzled Woman at the End of Her Tether.
She and her son -- did I mention that he's really annoying? (even Joseph Morgenstern thought so) -- live in a creepy, shadow-filled old house that seems much too large for the two of them, with sinister long dark corridors, an imposing staircase, doors that open on their own, and electricity that's always mysteriously going off, plunging the place in darkness. At night, needless to say, the house makes all the usual creepy-old-haunted-house noises. It also contains the requisite Scary Basement.
I feel as if I've seen this creepy old house or its equivalent way too many times before -- in a million horror movies, in fact, dating from the early talkies right up to "The Conjuring."
What's more, at various dramatic points in the film, plaster walls split -- sound familiar? -- and at one point the mother peels back some wallpaper and large black beetles come crawling out. This last phenomenon, though, may be Only in Her Head. (Apparently there are people, judging from some of the comments I've seen on this site, who actually think it's a brilliantly original notion to maintain some ambiguity as to whether a horror tale's events have a supernatural or a psychological explanation. Sorry, folks, that's old hat.)
Another ancient rule that this film scrupulously follows is that, despite all the creepy things that go on in the house, the characters continue to live there.
And then there's the book, the nasty, somewhat Edward Gory-ish illustrated children's pop-up book that gives the movie its title and its maybe-real, maybe-imaginary, never-quite-glimpsed monster. The book itself (nicely designed, incidentally, by a heavy-duty far-left feminist of uncertain gender named Alexandra "Alex" Juhasz) is an exceedingly clever creation, right down to the old-fashioned-looking lettering (or font?) of the text. But the fact that this evil volume proves infallibly prophetic (the Babadook knocks three times, etc., just as the book warns), and the way it keeps reappearing, even after it's thrown away and later torn to pieces, is just ho-hum predictable.
So is the fact that the family dog ends up dead -- a plot point that's thuddingly obvious from the moment we first spy the animal, even before we see the dog killed in the book. It's practically a requirement of the genre.
(But speaking of this book, it's rather puzzling: I don't recall the mother ever looking at the title page to see who the author is, or even if any author is listed. Which is it supposed to be, a one-of-a-kind handmade item or an actual published children's book? You'd think a modern-day mother might do something as prosaic as looking it up on the Internet.)
An additional genre cliché: the way the people in the movie who'd normally be expected to provide help -- like the (caricatured) police, (caricatured) social workers, and to some extent a psychiatrist and the woman's own sister -- prove to be callous, stiff, dense, unsympathetic, and generally unhelpful.
But then, who in his right mind would want to hang around with that mother and son anyway? I began to find them tedious -- the yammering, neurotic, demanding kid and his long-suffering, put-upon mother -- within the first ten minutes.
So I was relieved when, in the second half of the movie, she finally cracked up and was transformed into a raving madwoman, Murderous Mom, stalking around the house with a carving knife in time-honored horror-movie fashion. At least, in this mode, she seemed less weak and insipid.
Still, this reverse one-note performance soon began to grate; the mother (the boy, too, come to think of it) simply spent too much time yelling and screaming. (One of the commenters on this site complained that all that hollering gave him a headache. I know what he meant.) Really, the sort of thing that deserves our applause is the rare horror movie that manages to generate fear softly and quietly.
P.S. I noticed that "Babadook" publicity quotes a highly laudatory tweet from "Exorcist" director William Friedkin. Frankly, I'm mystified that the creator of several bona fide classics could praise so joyless and derivative a film. Perhaps, like Morgenstern and other critics, Friedkin is inclined to be overly generous to low-budget indies. Maybe he's gone a bit senile. Or maybe he relished this film's occasional over-the-top "Exorcist"-type moments, including a gravity-defying bed and something vaguely reminiscent of the earlier film's vomiting scene.