Childhood Fears

Rating: 9/10 (23 November 2014)

Children can have the creepiest things in their minds and are sometimes the cruelest beings on this planet. Perhaps, because they are still linked to some primal fear memory. The Babadook is a child's fear manifested in our adult world. An aspect of fear that we try to control and overcome. But this also makes us question that how far exactly are we from it? The world with its material attractions dull our senses, desensitize us to these things. But, that's exactly what we would like to believe in the waking world. Because, when we go to sleep and darkness lays its heavy hands on our eyelids, we return to a primordial soup of memories that we both like to remember and forget at the same time. This tension, I believe, is the stuff of nightmares and childhood fears, that we try all the time to keep at bay.
How this fear is manifested and given shape by a mother's guilt forms the second layer of the story. Guilt, despair, and hopelessness give rise to strange manifestations in our fragile minds, especially when we don't have a support system. People start breaking up. This is exemplified by the mother, who loses her husband in a car crash, when he was driving her to the hospital to have her baby. The child is born, and is seen by the mother as the cause for her unhappiness. This externalization of the loss and the cause for blame is, of course, at a subconscious level. But her veneer of strength slowly crumbles as the days pass and she becomes less of a mother and something else altogether. After bearing this unhappiness for seven long years, she slowly teeters off the edge of her sanity. The onset of loneliness, depression, and ultimately insanity form the major themes in this film. The lack of sleep, imaginary noises, and the strain of consoling a constantly scared child creates havoc on the mother's nerves and is manifested in the looming and ever-growing shadow of The Babadook.
The name, "Babadook" is nonsensical, and I feel, it's a name that actually is a forced word, manufactured to rhyme with the children's poem – "If it's in a word, or if it's in a book/ You can't get rid of the Babadook." Maybe, it's something to do with Baba Yaga? Who knows? We do that sometimes; manufacture stuff, in our own minds to fit stuff into place. But, in this case, it goes horribly wrong.
Themes of motherhood, single parenting and a child's imagination are extant throughout the film. We can, at least identify with one or more themes in the film. As children, we have always imagined our toys to life, given monstrous shapes in the dark to clothes bunched up in the corner of a roomand so on.
Stylistically, this film creates a feel of claustrophobia and suffocation, more so, by the use of minimal color. The blue seems grey, the grey seems greyer, the whites are never really white, and the blacks just get darker still.
This film, I think, is comparable in many ways to The Shining, Jacob's Ladder, Angel Heart, The Sixth Sense, The Machinist and books such as The Believers (Robert Arthur) and The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson). For people with an appetite for old school terror and scares, this film is definitely recommended.