Grief in women as the boogeyman (SPOILER ALERT)

Rating: 7/10 (27 March 2017)

Jennifer Kant's film, The Babadook, is a brilliant film in where you find suspense and inclusively, great sound effects that keep the viewers "over the edge." Although the monster looked unrealistic, I find this film to be astounding due to the various ways Kant illustrates in showing the living hell a widow lives in their daily life. For instance, the falling down scenes were a great way to portray her devastation of the car accident in where her husband died. It demonstrates an internal emotion Amelia suffers through from the stress and resentment against her child that is largely built inside of her for years. A great indication to the stress has to be when she has trouble sleeping and it soon transfuses into her child. Additionally, scopophilia is used in a scene in where she is caught staring at a couple making out in the parking lot, which only prompted her fantasies. I imagine it is not a coincidence to learn that Amelia used to write children books in her spare time and a children book that was found in her bookshelf is the result of the appearance of the boogeyman. It is then suggested that the allegory of the boogeyman is the women who are in grief due to the death of their partners. Jennifer Kant used smart tactics throughout the film that showed Amelia's poor mentality and although she spent years trying to portray an image that she was all right. The boogeyman is that ugly part of Amelia that she had tried to bury, but is soon displaced when she kills her pet and made several attempts to do the same to her own child. Throughout the film it is shown an Amelia trying not to get the boogeyman get the best of her and Samuel fighting for his own life. In the final scenes, we are shown that even though she is learning to cope better in life, she will always have the boogeyman around her and the reason she is scared of the monster is because it makes her do terrible things that she would never imagine. This film is so great because it brings to light a topic that many women suffer through and is inclusively hard for others to understand, therefore to create grief as a monster was a brilliant way to show the audience what people live with.