The Babadook

Rating: NR 

Run Time: 93 mins

Director: Jennifer Kent

Starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall

I was prepared to love this movie…for a number of good reasons: I have been reading the enthusiastic hype for months; the story idea is a great springboard for a horror movie; I’m an Essie Davis fan (I encourage anyone who will listen to watch the Phryne Fisher murder mysteries); the concept art for the monster looked cool.  But you know what?

 

Ba-Ba-Ba…big fucking deal.  That’s what.

My working theory for explaining the critical adulation this film has engendered is this:  the director Jennifer Kent went all around God’s green earth talking up how clever and important and smart and deeeep and significant this movie is.  The movie is just not that good.  I have read several of these interviews and it strikes me that she has little natural affinity with the horror field.  I think Kent wanted to make an art house horror flick.  She wasn’t successful…because art house horror movies aren’t scary.     But she still has reviewers, not to miss out on that hype or be seen as unsophisticated rubes, getting absolutely orgasmic in their descriptive language of how swell and how awfully frightening the picture is.

    

Yet, with all it had in its favor and for all the complimentary reviews, The Babadook is still one of the most overrated films in years.  Go back five years at least, when the posers were creaming all over themselves about how great Black Swan was.  That overrated…

The movie tells the story of Amelia and her son, who are essentially each other’s world.  She has wrapped him in a cocoon of sorts that he actively chafes against.  Yet it is clear they love each other; their affection is very real.  Amelia was being driven to the hospital by her husband the night Jacob, her son, was born.  During the trip, they were in a vehicular accident that left the husband, Oskar, dead.  Amelia’s manner of handling her grief is to bury it.  She doesn’t allow Jacob to celebrate his birthday on his birthday, for instance.  Otherwise, they share their lives together: meals, story time, the ritual of looking in closets and under beds for the monsters. 

One evening, at Jacob’s bedtime, he discovers a children’s book that neither even knew he owned.  It’s called Mr. Babadook, and boy is it a mind fuck.  This Babadook character is not at all a nice fellow.  In fact, he’s out to fuck you up and is not coy about announcing his intentions.  When they reach the point in the illustrated book where it becomes clear that the Babadook is a sinister sort of bloke, Amelia insists they stop reading.  Good idea…except the damned thing keeps showing up again and again.  She tears it apart and trashes it; it reappears.  She burns the motherfucker; this seems to do the trick, until he starts prank-calling (it’s hard to charge a monster with terroristic threat if you can’t convince the police he’s real, after all).  What is more, Amelia starts to catch glimpses of Mr. Babadook in the shadows or around corners.  It seems the book isn't necessary to invoke him anymore; Jacob believes the fucker’s already in the house and he’s starting to suspect he might be in Mom!   

If the movie goer is to make a stab at understanding the significance of the Babadook as a symbol, he must make some assumptions about the presumed state of mind of Amelia at the film’s beginning.  The early scenes are supposed to suggest how entrenched she is in her continued grief and how exhausting the task of being the single parent of an out-of- control child; that same child is also the constant reminder of her husband’s death such as to contribute to her unconscious resentment of the son.  It is certainly true that Essie Davis looks washed out and tired beyond belief.  But I’ll tell you what: if I were a single mother trying to raise an active child while holding down a shit job, I’d look like Amelia, too.  Further, if the shit job entailed caring for senile old bitties who keep changing their tea orders, I would hate to go to work as well.  In fact, I often do hate to go to work, and I look about the same when I come home…emotionally drained.  So the film doesn't convince us that her everlasting grief or unwillingness to manage or confront it are the reasons she constantly looks like she’s about two seconds away from cutting her own throat.  I have often ended up with a few hesitation marks on my neck when I shave for work in the morning.

The same is true of Jacob.  We are apparently meant to see him as a behaviorally maladjusted child who acts out in inappropriate ways.  Clearly, Jennifer Kent doesn't have a son.  That is what every six year-old boy I have ever seen acts like…hyperactive and occasionally barely controllable.  In fact, I thought of him as being a very imaginative and precocious child in the best sense of the word; he was tremendously clever.  Further, I rather admired his ingenuity with weapons systems.  They damn well serve a practical function later in the movie.  And another thing, I would have pushed that bitch cousin out of the goddamned tree-house, too.  Save for the intermittent high-pitched, wail-like scream he would emit every once in a while, I thought he was quite normal. 

In one of her seemingly never-ending press interviews, Jennifer Kent suggested she could not find any research on the difficult (task) faced by mothers raising children.  Are you fucking kidding me?  There have been years of study on the terrible guilt working mothers experience.  There has been research on the spurious idea that women possess some mythically innate “maternal instinct.” Moreover, those studies have demonstrated that the quality is not quite so universal as our patriarchal society likes to believe.  Women can and often do resent the ever-loving shit out of their children.  And they are not the only ones.   In fact, there is an entire litany of offenses for which I, the father, have told my children I will most certainly kill them, dismember their bodies, and bury the parts in our back yard.   

So that I don’t come off entirely as a conservatively literal curmudgeon, I would like to mention the things I really did like.  The acting on the principles’ part is great.  Essie Davis does exactly what she must do to sell the part; she’s a damned good actor.  What I didn’t buy was her potential for hypersensitivity to unexplained phenomena.  Fair enough, though, because, in my understanding, psychosis with paranoid features isn’t uncommon.  It is because of her ever-increasingly suspicious frame of mind that she begins to hallucinate. 

Noah Wiseman, too, was incredible.  He was hilariously energetic, playing Jacob with a boundless energy that would suggest, too, that his imagination was so vivid that the job of differentiating between fantasy and reality might be terribly difficult for his character.  Jennifer Kent must be responsible for coaxing this performance from the boy.  She has spoken of how she coached Noah Wiseman such that she got the performance she needed without at the same time scaring the holy shit out of him, and I bet that was an incredibly difficult thing to do.  The choice to keep other characters peripheral to the story was, if not just a lazy way of shunting underwritten parts to the side, also the right one.  It effectively (highlights) the incredible isolation the mother and son feel (she subjects him to this in the mistaken belief that he is the dangerous one).  Both are alienated from any substantive companionship outside of their own circle of two. 

And, finally, the conception and rendering of the Babadook itself is great, as is the central story idea that introduces him to the film.  Kent has noted the influence of German Expressionist Horror on the character (I don’t doubt she is a cinephile, mind you) and he looks like a great cross between Lon Chaney’s vampire in the lost London After Midnight and Graf Orlock from Nosferatu.  The children’s book illustrations heighten the nightmare quality of the design.  Even here, though, I must protest.  If there was one thing that could have improved the film, I believe showing the monster lurking around in the shadows more than he is seen would have succeeded in convincing us better that we needed to pay careful/closer attention to any clues that would elucidate for us the actuality beyond our immediate senses; after all, I think that is part of the fun of watching psychological horror: you get to argue in good nature with your friends about whether the monster or ghost or demon really existed at all. 

I know this is a counterintuitive concept in horror cinema; generally, it is certainly true that the less the monster is seen, the more frightening it is.  I just don’t think it worked here.  His appearances were so infrequent that it was too easy to believe he was just not real, that he was merely an auditory and visual illusion for Amelia.  Psychological horror, as I understand it, cannot survive that absence of ambiguity.  And that is absolutely what we have here.  I’m usually not a fan of this sub-genre because it’s just not scary.  Sure, the pseudo-intellectuals like to talk about it and go on about how “frightening” such stuff is, but they’re talking out of their collective ass.  Blood and tits are too low-brow for this set. 

But if it’s done well, it can be scary as well as thought-provoking.  And it doesn’t need gore or nudity to ingratiate itself with an audience.  Psychological horror always seems firmly rooted in the fertile soil of psychoanalysis theory.  A repressed something wells up from the dark recesses of the unconscious and manifests itself in corporeal form, or at least seems to.  The trick about viewing a “psychological horror film” is determining whether the “thing” is real or imaginary.  In the world of David Cronenberg, we are blessed because his protagonists’ demons more often than not actually and absolutely do take physical form, certainly during his aptly-called body horror years.  His characters develop tumorous growths or parasitical creatures with a specifically sexual nexus, or they grow phallic appendages or vaginal orifices, or they birth “children of rage.”  Or they become something else entirely, something terrible and foreign.

In other movies, we are not so fortunate.  We must do the work ourselves…in a sense.  Surely the undisputed master of this horror sub-set was Val Lewton and his greatest director, Jacques Tourneur.  There is really no sure way to determine if voodoo magic is real or not (I Walked with a Zombie) or whether Irena is a were-panther or not (Cat People).  Tourneur would perform the same trick again in Night of the Demon in the late fifties; one could even make the argument that the demon which eventually appears is a figment of the overwrought imagination of its victims.  Consider The Haunting or The Innocents…  In fact, these two films are particularly good as exemplars to compare The Babadook to, at least and if only superficially, because they deal with women (highly suggestible women) with very sensitive and very vivid imaginations.

Of course, the central theme of what is real and what is not was baked into the movies in their adherence to their source material, but they are still marvelously constructed films that deal with women confronted with traumatic events that occur within seemingly haunted houses.  Further, Eleanor and the governess deal with their experiences in such a way that it is almost (if not) impossible to determine if what they are enduring is real or not.  That seems to be the crux of psychological horror.  The ambiguity that balances the dichotomy of the real and the purely imaginary is so tricky to parse out.  But in The Babadook, it’s just not.  And further, the way it unfolds made it difficult for me to give two shits, anyway.  Until the end.  Stick around for that, because it is good.  It cannot redeem the film for me, but it is poignant and clever.   

Some who read my thoughts on this movie may consider me a literalist philistine who lacks the subtlety of mind to “get” this picture, but do not be fooled by them; there is nothing to “get.”  In fact, and this pisses me off, really, I have yet to see or read a review whose writer has had the fortitude to call the movie out.  It’s fucking boring!  There… 

It’s this sort of hypocritical pseudo-intellectual pandering that makes the film industry the world’s largest mutual admiration, where its critics are just so many sycophants who must not miss their seat on the boat when a few respected critics start lauding a film.  Everyone must instantly write his own unthinking piece on how great the goddamned movie in question is for fear of being left out of the vomitus of hyperbole that accompanies a few favorable reviews.  I do not excuse myself, for I have been equally guilty of the very same.

Quite simply, the movie does not do a good job of rendering the central dilemma sufficiently equivocal.  First it’s one thing (the monster is real!) and then it’s the other thing (it’s all in her head!), without never there being a proper balance maintained (or even attained at all) between the two possibilities.  Sure, the idea is a really good one, as far as movies that deal with female neurosis or psychosis go (and we ought to as well add Repulsion to the list).  She is certainly repressing something…but what?  She is sleep-deprived (very often linked to psychosis as an exacerbating factor).  Check.  She is isolated.  Check.  Her constant companion is a six year-old (an unlikely source of intellectual stimulation).  Check.  Her job sucks and she’s got no love life.  Check.

But I never felt threatened.  I wasn’t scared for the mother or the kid.  I didn’t think they were ever really threatened.  So there’s no sense of danger, no stakes.  And who cares anyway, because the two of them are so fucking isolated that no one is likely to miss their stupid asses in any event.

I suppose we have Freud to blame for this…  

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 4/10