Worthwhile but frustrating

Rating: 7/10 (12 October 2015)

I still don't quite know how to feel about "The Babadook". The trailer left me more excited than I've been for any horror film in years. However, I should know by now that horror trailers often misrepresent the movie. "The Babadook" has horror/thriller elements, but it's definitely not the monster movie you might expect. The closest comparison would be Aronofsky's "Black Swan" - both are slow, increasingly surreal portraits of a woman's descent into madness. However, by the end of "The Babadook" I was wondering if even that was the correct explanation. This movie left me with questions, and not in a good way.
The plot concerns a woman struggling to raise her troublesome son while doing her best to stifle her grief for his father. The fact that he died while driving her to the hospital to give birth plants the seeds of resentment that drive the plot. It's an uncomfortable subject matter, and one that provides the real "horror" of the story - that a mother could have such dark feelings towards her own child. We see her try to push them down and be the best mother she can, and over the course of the movie the effort starts to crack her.
Unfortunately, this solid premise is muddled by the introduction of a very ambiguous monster - the titular Babadook. The evil (and reappearing) pop-up book that introduces the creature is fantastically creepy, however the payoff to all that foreboding is little more than a few cursory (and sometimes very cheap) scares. It all comes together in a mystifying muddle of an ending. From the moment the Babadook was introduced, I never doubted for a minute that it could simply be a product of the mother's fevered mind. However, the ending gives us frustratingly little closure. If it was all in her mind, it means she hallucinated half the movie. If it was real, we are never given confirmation. I began to wonder if the entire movie was simply meant to be taken metaphorically. Some viewers may be OK with this conclusion, I was not.
Of course, there is still a great deal to praise. Essie Davis' performance as the mother is genuinely incredible - award-worthy, even. Watching her start out so frazzled and quiet only to be (literally) roaring by the end was a real treat. The son, too, is surely one of the best child actors I've ever seen. The atmosphere throughout is off-kilter and consistently unnerving (again, quite "Black Swan"-esque) with some particularly good sequences where we see the monster's face, again and again, in old TV programs and movies. Ultimately "The Babadook" is a film experience worth having, but one that left me a little unsatisfied.