Remember kids, don't watch horror movies while suffering from a toothache

Rating: Null/10 (2 December 2017)

Making a good genre film sometimes just seems so easy. And horror is among the easiest, I mean, what's there to it? You just need a simple premise, a creepy visual style, a creepy antagonist, a few good scares (and you would be surprised by how few), maybe even a couple of call-backs to cult films (for the movie nerd crowd), and there you have it. But somewhere along the way, it's like people got lost and started thinking that horror is merely about invoking a series of physical responses to loud noises and hacksaw editing. So we can thank our stars that director Jennifer Kent delivered in 2014, pretty much out of nowhere, a movie that stays true to the basic tenants of good horror movie-making and in the process actually manages to tell a story that resonates. Even if it will make you paranoid about pop-up books.
Seven years after a tragic car accident that killed her husband and left her a single parent, Amelia (Essie Davies)is still in a painful state of mourning. Her life is split between her stupefying daily job as a nurse in a retirement home, and her parental responsibilities as a mother to her spirited and hyper-active son, the prospective magician Sam (Noah Wiseman). The events of the car crash still exert a strain on the relationship between Amelia and Sam, as Amelia becomes increasingly disassociated and Sam becomes enclosed in his own world. At the time a palpable wedge gets driven between the two, a curious book called The Babadook appears in Sam's bookshelf. This herald of horror will lead the two down a path replete with madness and dread.
On a very basic level, you can call Babadook a poltergeist movie. It mostly takes place in a singular environment as Amelia and Sam live in a rickety two-story Victorian house with a top-floor bedroom, a kitchen and TV room as well as a creepy basement – all classic horror staples. Said location begins to exert an influence over the tenants, to gut-wrenching results. But in contrast, the exact nature of the beast haunting the pair is a little more complex than just a wandering malicious spirit. Bereavement has had its toll on Amelia's soul and sanity, and grim things happen inside her mind. The loss of a loved one triggers a self-defending state of denial, one which leaves her blind to the rest of the world. While Sam has something of an escape in his over-active imagination, this gives rise to animosity in Amelia and they are forced to deal with the terrifying events that have left them broken. On the visual department, Babadook is stylishly shot with a fetching and creepy colour palette. The set design recalls horror movies of yore with its haunted home setting, and the static camera-work keeps thing anchored with minimal movement and with the help of tasteful and smart editing. One would be justified in fearing an overabundance of jump-scares in a movie like this, but thankfully that is not the case. Understated is the name of the game when it comes to the scares in this movie. Every scare has a decent level of build-up that escalates to a strong shock that never feels cheap or hair-brained. This isn't one of those movies that throws something at your face and pats itself on the back for making you flinch, and instead works on percolating the frights slowly, allowing you to really sink in the atmosphere.
To show Amelia's ever decreasing sanity, interesting and always surprising techniques and set-pieces are contrasted with more mundane, but equally disturbing images. Stop motion freaks lounge around unsettlingly, half-seen monstrosities lurk at the edge of your eyesight as darkness sits forebodingly in the corner of every room. But the single scariest scene in the movie is without any effects, the scene where Sam has a seizure will haunt you the longest. And it is this combination of fanciful and factual that gives the movie a style and a tone of its own. Essie Davis provides a powerhouse performance, at once powerful at the other pained. While the screenplay does provide a hint of cheese, Davis' acting chops keep everything grounded and legitimately believable. This prevents the movie from feeling too breezy, and even when things get ridiculous you are still sold on the character's plight. As a child actor, Noah Wiseman also gives a good performance. He will both melt your heart and strain your nerves at the same time, without every draining the role of pathos and empathy.
Horror flicks have a love-hate relationship with women. After watching enough spooky pictures it's genuinely hard to not think how the bedrock of the genre is made of the suffering of women. Think of all the scream queens, the last woman standing alive, the titillating ladies that get brutally murdered for no reason, the poor girls that get possessed, and it feels like the list goes on. Sure, there are a number of exceptional female characters; Ellen Ripley and Rosemary Woodhouse are layered and dynamic characters for sure, but even then they are usually products of male writers and directors.
So it's genuinely intriguing that director Jennifer Kent chose the horror genre to tell this story. And her command of the genre actually allows her to express a series of ideas that never ring false, that are genuinely heartfelt and even dig just a little bit deeper than most horror movies even aspire to.