Disappointed

Rating: 3/10 (18 November 2014)

Seeing the trailer I was so hyped for this movie I can't even tell you. I love horrors but am very picky & hard to scare.I found the book really creepy & figured a good soils plot was finally gracing the genre after a long time. Sadly the book is the only scary thing here and soon disappears literally up in smoke like the first half's promise of a gripping and resolved storyline. The beginning is pretty good, you feel the mother's exhaustion, tension and sense of isolation but to be grieving so much after 7 years makes you wonder why its taken 7 years to get this far? It begins to seem far fetched. I grew up with a grieving parent who had tendencies to alcohol and medication abuse abuse and act violently and irrationally then emotionlly so the switch In the mother's persona and sons reaction is relatable if not a bit OTT. I get it, babadook is meant to be the anger a and pain manifested from grief but the execution is poor. The basement scene where she feeds it made me want to put my head in my hands with frustration as it made the whole story ludicrous. The ending is lazy and too soon.. The mother goes mental, her kid stabs and restrains her, she pukes, yells at the babadook then locks it up with her husband's things and pacifies it with bugs her kid catches a after a simple knock on the door makes her snap out of killing her dog and trying to kill her kid, all of which have no further mention or consequence.suddenly she's back at work and back to being the perfect lovely calm person and mother, kid has his birthday, the end. Its kind of a sweet ending to see her pain is managed after she faces her husbands death, again having lost someone I relate to the grief, denial anger and acceptance as well as the vivid nightmares and day hallucinations fro. Grief so this was quite believable but the whole film seemed to be missing something and felt so cliché. They should have gone full horror which would have worked, or marketed this as a drama/psychological thriller to avoid being so misleading. Watch it, but keep an open mind and don't expect too much.