Ghosts of Life

Rating: 7/10 (17 February 2015)

There are times during the viewing of "The Babadook" that I feel too overwhelmed with the tragedy of a widowed mother and her little son. One feels the realism and gets suffocated. My sympathy runs back and forth between the mother and the son. Before I know it, I feel for the two characters very deeply. After the film's director Jennifer Kent has that feeling registered and established in my mind, I am ready to follow her to any length. The Babadook thus seems real, scary, and very, very disturbing. Anytime it acts up, we feel. This is a great accomplishment of this first-time feature film director. She makes a drama-horror film to work so well. I am not so sure if her being a woman has a lot to do with this deep sentiment of a mother-son relationship, especially the one with a deceased husband as well as a woman's sexual needs. My guess is that it does. Another contribution is the respect Jennifer Kent has for the audience at large. She does not try to over-explain anything. She really wants you in there with her, as opposed to pushing us into a spook house and laughing her heart out at our reactions. Drawing from "The Babadook", I conclude that a horror film that works must make us deeply care for the characters, so the subsequent fate of theirs will always be construed as our business. This fact may be true to an art piece in any form, but for a film such as this type, mandatory.