The Babadook

Rating: 7/10 (16 February 2015)

Amelia is a young widow; her husband, the father of her son, was killed in a car crash seven years ago, and if the boy is not mad he is slowly driving her nuts with his obsessing over the Babadook, a mysterious entity which is really only a character from a rather weird children's book. Or is it real? Certainly he seems to think so, and his obsession is so out of hand that he is as good as thrown out of school, and is causing his mother's friends to ostracise her. Well, if you are invited to a birthday party where you throw a young girl out of a tree house, what else can you expect?
As far as psychological thrillers go, this is not a bad offering; we've seen it all before of course, as with "The Exorcist", but this film - which is really more of a play with two leads and a side cast - has no real resolution, though it must surely have been a baptism of fire for 7 year old Noah Wiseman. Few roles he takes on later in his career are likely to be anywhere near as trying as this.