Average film, didn't live up to potential, silly ending.

Rating: 5/10 (2 November 2015)

Summary: main characters are an annoying whiney-voiced, screamy child and his mother who is suffering from depression (and possibly mania, hallucinations etc) after the death of they boy's father in a car accident when he was driving her to the hospital to give birth to said whiney-voiced son.
For no seemingly apparent reason the mother starts to have a very serious breakdown. She is still depressed from the death of her husband but this was about 8 or 9 years ago so this has been a very slow breakdown! The annoying kid has been playing up at school and this exasperates matters.
So one night the boy asks his mum to read The Babadook to him. The Babadook is a children's book that has appeared on the kid's shelf out of nowhere, with no explanation and no question from the mother. The Book is quite a scary one for a child and hints at a demon coming into the house to frighten and/or possess and/or kill the occupants. It would appear that, in Ring-esque fashion, reading the book somehow starts the chain of events that allows The Babadook to enter the house.
So anyway, the kid starts seeing stuff and has a fit. Then the mum starts seeing stuff. Then the mum gets possessed, goes a bit mental, kills the dog. Then at the end the kid and mother somehow (though not really clear how) exorcise the demon. The demon then seems to be contained in their basement and they collect worms to feed it with (sounds daft? It is).
There is the slightest hint that the mother may have written the book and my interpretation of the film is that she did, and that she just had a breakdown and the demon is all in her mind. And they keep it in the basement and feed it worms.
Review: The concept was decent, the book was creepy and there were one or two scenes that were a bit spooky (though I never felt this film got anywhere near as good or as scary as it could have been). The pace was a bit slow, the 2 main characters were annoying and the sub-characters were unessential, badly written padding and even more annoying than the main characters. I thought the ending was a bit naff. While it did entertain us for Halloween night, I think this was a pretty average film and given the annoying characters and lack of scares, it doesn't have any repeat viewing value.