Single mom + spooky kid + scary monster = instant horror classic

Rating: 8/10 (29 November 2014)

This ambitious Aussie film fits into the same horror subgenre as "The Exorcist, " "The Shining" and "The Sixth Sense"—single (or almost single) mother's spooky child makes contact with scary supernatural entity. A brittle young widow, Amelia (a blond Essie Davis, of "Miss Fisher's Mysteries"), is having trouble coping with her seven-year-old son, Sam, a fragile-looking boy who's plagued by nightmares; among other peculiarities, he goes around with a homemade dart gun and cricket-ball catapult to ward off monsters. W/d Jennifer Kent's come up with a great high concept: a creepy pop-up book, "Mister Babadook," suddenly appears on Sam's bookshelf, with a sheaf of blank pages at the end hinting at further horrors to come.
The climactic scenes, when the Babadook, a wedge-toothed, scarecrowlike apparition, gets under Amelia's skin in earnest, have topnotch-horror-film momentum, and the script gains enough of your trust with its subtle and involving buildup that you may be willing, as I was, to spend a little time puzzling out the meaning of it all when it's over. Purists have dismissed this one as a softcore Freudian fantasy, not really a horror film at all, but if you're not too rigid about categories, I think you'll be impressed by the artistry of the opening scenes, and no matter what you decide the Babadook stands for—the son's anxiety, the mother's depression and her longing for her dead husband (or for death itself), the son's awareness of her accumulated resentment, all of the above, or just another scary monster—I think you'll agree that it has to be kept well fed and strictly in its place. Essie Davis, a model of upper-crust composure in "Miss Fisher," really gets to stretch in this one. Now in theatrical release, "The Babadook" is available from Time Warner on demand.