Mommy knows best

Rating: Null/10 (12 January 2015)

"Suppressed grief suffocates. It rages within the breast, and multiplies its strength." - Ovid
Clichés abound in "The Babadook", a critically acclaimed film by writer-director Jennifer Kent. The plot? After the death of her husband, Amelia (Essie Davis) begins to resent her son Sam (Noah Wiseman). The domestic strains of motherhood, combined with Amelia's repressed grief, have led to Amelia lashing out at her kid. She does not want him in her life, doesn't want the responsibilities he entails and, more importantly, hates the way he reminds her of her dead spouse. As the film progresses, Amelia will actively blame Sam for her husband's death.
As Amelia's unconscious and conscious worlds collide, Amelia descends into madness. At first she merely neglects her maternal duties ("If you're hungry, why don't you eat ***t?"), but eventually outright wishes that Sam were dead. Sam instinctively suspects that something threatening lurks in the family home, but cannot fathom that his mother is the source of this evil. Instead, he displaces his fears onto "the Babadook", a shadowy creature. Amelia insists that this creature does not exist. There are no monsters, she tells her son. I am not a monster.
The Babadook is initially introduced as a character from one of Sam's storybooks. "When you realise what's underneath, you'll wish you were dead," the book states. It henceforth becomes clear that the the Babadook serves a protective function. It is Amelia's means of externalising pain and so not fully experiencing grief. For Amelia, facing (and eventually becoming) a ghoul is infinitely preferable to confronting the overwhelming tragedy of a husband who died on the cusp of fatherhood. Significantly, Amelia spends the film avoiding conversations about her dead spouse. She adopts a strategy of silence and avoidance. To confront is too traumatic.
"Supernatural monsters are expurgations of ourselves," George Romero once wrote. "By distinguishing them from us, we hope to destroy them and so exorcise the monsters within." No surprise then that, phonetically, "baba dook" means "father grief" in several languages (Hindia, Arabic etc). Amelia eventually realises this herself; she is the Babadook. She is the beast. And the beast's unconscious desires are always within her.
After an extended battle with her son, Amelia metaphorically vomits the ink from which the Babadook storybook was written, and then locks the "creature" in her home basement. Having taken control of her unconscious inclinations, she periodically visits and feeds the "beast". Whether she is dangerously nurturing her hate, or whether she is merely responsibly keeping it at bay and so "healthily" creating a place for grief to live, is left up to the audience.
Obvious, heavy-handed and predictable, everything "The Babadook" does – aesthetically and thematically - is lifted from somewhere else. The film's mother and child relationship recalls "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist". Its descent into over-the-top supernatural violence recalls "Carrie" - another film about the return of the maternally repressed - as well as the wackily repressed characters of other Brian De Palma horror films ("Raising Cain", "Dressed to Kill"). Elsewhere the film's scratchy, low-tech monsters recall the sputtering monsters of the "Ring" franchise, the beasts of Tourner's "Night of the Demon", Lynch's "Eraserhead" - itself a film about parental fears - and the ghostly shadow monsters of "Intruders" (2014) and "Vanishing on 7th Street". Throw in the "repression/denial" themes of Kubrick's "The Shining" and Haneke's "Hidden", the "parental anxieties" of horror films like "Take Shelter" and "Don't Look Now", as well as references to "Ghostbusters", "Night of the Hunter", "Nosferatu" and Polanski's "Repulsion", another film about the female unconscious, and you have a film which plays like a flatly shot homage to better movies. Rather than art, "The Babadook" feels like an amalgamation of trends.
The political movements of the late 1950s and 1960s gave rise to horror films in which paternal or patriarchal figureheads were questioned, undermined and unmasked. One of the best of these films was Nicholas Ray's "Bigger Than Life", in which a father - pushed by the pressures of a class and status obsessed society - descends into madness and attempts to kill his son. George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" likewise begins with Daddy and State revealed to be dangerous goof-balls. During this period, virtually all major horror films sought to dethrone Daddy, to question Symbolic Power, from the sexist creeps in "Rosemarry's Baby" and "The Stepford Wives", to the anti-authoritarian "The Crazies". This trend ended, roughly, with Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", a film in which "caretakers", be they literal fathers, or the appointed figureheads of tribes, nations and power-brokers, engage in cycles of violence against those they claim to protect. For Kubrick, spaces are haunted not by monsters, but by the weight of history itself, and Daddy's a genocidal, infanticidal maniac due to a seemingly inescapable feedback loop: Man represses because he repeats and repeats because he represses. During this period, Steven Spielberg was one of the few mainstream auteurs to churn out horror movies which went against these counter-cultural trends. His Daddies were rehabilitated, and portrayed as guardians worth re-embracing.
Crazy women were in vogue in late 1980s, early 1990s cinema (hysterectomy and hysteria are derived from the same word, the latter implying that maternity and madness are one and the same). But infanticide by women, or the hating of kids by their mothers, was a bit too politically incorrect for the time period. Nevertheless, Jean Luc-Godard made "Hail Mary" in 1985, an esoteric masterpiece about maternity being a kind of imposition, or rape, foisted upon women by an uncaring Nature. We then had films like "AntiChrist" and "We Need to Talk About Kevin", part of the wave of modern horror films to which "The Babadook" belongs. In each film, mothers seek the eradication of their inconvenient sons. Only in "The Babadook" does mommy reconcile with her maternal responsibilities.
6/10 – Worth one viewing.