"You Can't Get Rid of the Babadook..." And I Wouldn't Want it Any Other Way
When I first watched The Babadook, I was hyped up to the max, expecting nothing short of the best. Last Fall, a friend and I went to Toronto's After Dark film festival, an annual extravaganza that draws out every tophat-wearing, trench-coat toting potential serial killer in Southern Ontario. Looking around the audience during my very first After Dark screening, I realized that I could very believably imagine each viewer whispering, "I'd like to wear your skin to my next yoga class" in my ear. Namaste.
The Babadook was the 2014 festival's headliner. Did I get tickets? Nope. Why? Because they sold out faster than you can say, "Wait, what?" When they added a second, midnight screening, did I get tickets? You bet your ass I didn't, because 12am is past my bedtime.
So I waited. I waited months and months. I could have torrented it. I was tempted several times, knowing how easy it is. But I stopped myself.
I wanted my first time to be ~*~*~*perfect~*~*~*
Finally, it hit Netflix, and boy was it worth the wait. From the film's opening sequence, it's clear that The Babadook doesn't subscribe to the idea that the horror genre is somehow of lower quality than more Oscar-baity groups--it hits its audiences with superb acting and a gripping visual style right out of the gate.
The film centers around a single mother, Amelia (Essie Davis), who, after several years, is still reeling from the death of her husband, Oscar. She deals with conflicted feelings regarding her five-year-old son, Samuel -- played with incredible maturity by Noah Wiseman -- as Oscar died on the same day as Samuel's birth. Unfortuately for them, their troubles only intensify when they become plagued by a monstrous force known only as, (SPOILER ALERT), the Babadook.
Director Jennifer Kent and cinematographer Radek Ladczuk immediately establish a visual palette infused with blues, reflecting Amelia's downtroddenness and depression. Their house contrasts with others shown in the film, such as Amelia's sister's, firmly isolating Amelia and Samuel in a world of sadness, imagination, and a dangerous combination of the two. This, I found, was the most effective result of the filmic world's blue-ness---the colour palette created an otherworldly feeling perfectly suited to Amelia and Samuel's disconnectedness from reality, and, of course, the arrival of the Babadook.
~*~*~*Jennifer Kent's Blue Period~*~*~*
The Babadook itself is quite simplistically horrifying. It is the stuff that a child's nightmares are made of, the shadowy mass that sent us diving under our covers as kids. It is fitting, then, that Samuel first discovers the Babadook in a storybook that mysteriously appears one day on his shelf. The entire film plays with this thin line between child- and adulthood. Samuel is chastised for his rapidfire imagination, yet Amelia, too, is drawn into the Babadook book and, through the film's colour palette, is just as cut off from the world of adulthood. The fears of childhood, of being eaten by a monster, of being followed by a dark shadow, are intensely present in Kent's film, giving us chills and thrills without disembowlments or decapitations.
"And They All Lived Happily Ever After"
The picture above, I believe, aptly demonstrates Kent's conception of childhood as "Tim Burton Visits the Mortician." These moments gesture time and time again to a deeper feeling of a childhood gone dark, a perverted innocence. This proves extraordinarily affective--the audience is dragged along with Amelia through Hell and back. Again, though, Kent doesn't go in for any cheap jumps or gore shots, but lets the Babadook's presence build throughout the film, beginning with a simple voice:
This is the heavymetal lullaby I shall sing to my future children.
This voice so completely terrified the person I watched this movie with, that I followed them around for an hour afterwards, whispering, "Babadook..dooook...DOOOOOOOOOOK." They were unamused, and now no one will play with me.
Jennifer Kent's film is an exciting demonstration that the horror genre can display excellent performances, emotional authenticity, and believable relationships without sacrificing scares. The Babadook didn't have to come at Samuel with a chainsaw screaming profanities--it simply had to manipulate our most frightening and creative tool: the imagination.
I give this film:
