Impressive, low budget Aussie offering that restores your faith in horror

Rating: 9/10 (1 November 2015)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Morning *** Friday Night ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Amelia (Essie Davis) was widowed when her husband was driving her to hospital to give birth to their son Samuel (Noah Wiseman.) Since then, she has been struggling to raise Samuel alone, while he has been displaying some wild behaviour. Things take a sinister turn, however, when they discover a creepy looking book entitled The Babadook, and Samuel begins seeing an imaginary monster that drives him completely out of control. As Amelia is confronted with spooky happenings of her own, she finds herself pushed over the edge, on the verge of losing her own sanity.
Being Halloween week, it's been the perfect opportunity for me to get round to watching this well received, off the wayside horror offering that seems to have hailed from Australia. Marking Jennifer Kent's feature length directing debut, after a string of TV work and short films, this takes the familiar horror device of placing a child in the centre of the story and adds in more distinctive themes of unresolved grief and emotional dependency, and works them wonderfully, with only a fraction of the budget of your modern day, sanitised American horror film.
It lays its cards on the table very early on, taking a slow, lingering opening that generates its terror from a haunting use of atmosphere and silence. The set up created from the mother-and-son relationship generates an interesting dynamic all of its own, working in a way where you're never sure how it's going to work in relation to the unfolding story. Without any great special effects or CGI, Kent has crafted something that truly works and restores your faith in modern horror.
By the end, it's lost its original angle a little, and it's hard not to notice shades of The Shining and Poltergeist that have crept in to the script, but none of that detracts from what has gone before, a splendid offering that generally works and restores your faith in horror. ****