Not even bad enough to be funny

Rating: 1/10 (17 May 2015)

{Technically contains spoilers. Nothing to actually spoil}
Suggested tag-line: "The consequences of not spanking your child"
For the entire painstaking extent of the movie, one, and only one, emotion persists: a profound dislike of both of the main characters. The mother, after being in the car during the death of her husband years earlier, has an incredible amount of difficulty doing even the simplest, easiest tasks. Simply put, she is pathetic in the worst meaning of the term; a shell of a person. This may very well have been written intentionally, except that the shear amount of time that has passed makes it unacceptable that she is still somehow unable to handle simple day-to-day experiences even four years later.
It is this inability that has allowed her child to grow to roughly age 4 without even the faintest sign of discipline. Simply put, the child is more of a monster than the actual monster in this movie. Time and time again, he does things to endanger himself and others, all the while the mother just continues on in her own perpetually overwhelmed world.
This situation drones on and on for more than half the movie. To say that it's painful to sit through is an understatement. To say that it makes you despise both of them is understatement.
Given the rave reviews this movie received, I was determined to see it through to the end despite being thoroughly tired of it by the 30- minute mark. What I found was an anti-climatic movie that was sub-par in every regard except possibly the acting, assuming that these terrible characters were indeed as intended. To say that The Babadook is bad fails to do it justice.
Many people that like the movie praise it for being atypical of a horror movie, for being more of a psychological thriller than shock or jump horror, for it's atmosphere. As someone that thinks jump horror to be cheap, and far prefers psychological thrillers any day, let me say this: The Babadook is not a psychological thriller, as it is not thrilling. It is not atmospheric, as the entire movie is dull in every sense. It is not jump horror. It is not shock horror. It is not gore. It is not excited. It is not intelligent. It is not creative. It is nothing more than a strung-out story of two terrible people.
In short, it is nothing.