The Babadook Review -- You Can't Get Rid of Him

Babadook DOOK DOOOOOOK.

HELL. NAW.

After watching The Babadook with your significant other or friend (friendzone), you will undoubtedly be screeching BABADOOK in a loud and guttural voice that will terrorize those who have seen the film, and annoy those who haven’t. It sounds quite similar to the woman in the smoking cessation commercial. You know the one I’m talking about.

So have fun with that!

It’s no longer October, but I suggest that you make time for a new Thanksgiving tradition in your family as November 28, the Australian indie horror flick is finally available on VOD. The long wait is over!!

I got a special screening (courtesy of myself), and the film defied even my overly inflated expectations.

The story centers around a widower of seven years, Amelia, struggling to raise her troubled young son, Samuel, very much on her own.

Young, pallid, somewhat cute Samuel has an overly active imagination, checking in the closet and bed every night for monsters and taking advanced homemade weaponry to school to use against them, of which school officials are not particularly fond. (The weapons and Samuel that is.) His proclivity for violence and temper tantrums leads to young Samuel’s indefinite suspension from school while Amelia tries to figure out what to do with him.

A caretaker in a nursing home, Amelia is #foreveralone and forever taking care of someone other than herself, and with only her sister still willing to talk to her and Samuel (but not come to her creepy, giant old house); Amelia’s life is not picturesque. Her frustrations with other “desperate” housewives are emblemized when she goes ballistic on a neighborhood mother for complaining about her gym and charity work being so damn difficult.

What drove this mild-mannered woman to commit social suicide? You thought I forgot about Mr. Babadook had you? I have not. It was him.

Samuel pulls this mysterious red book off the shelf for his mother to read him to sleep, and if I’ve learned anything from watching films, it’s don’t read that unknown book. And NEVER aloud! Haven’t you seen The Evil Dead, Amelia??!!

“If it’s in a word or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” Sounds like your typical children’s popup book actually. Carry on.

After traumatizing her child and herself further with a children’s book, things go from just bad to badder.

The film has plenty of jumpy moments in which you may find yourself shrieking at the sight or potential sight of the Babadook in his top-hatted glory, but the building tension to the inevitable–a mother lashing out at her own child, is what is truly horrific.

While both classically phantasmic and anchored by a classic creepy kid trope, watching Amelia’s lonely descent fills you with both extreme pity and fear. Suffering from insomnia, migraines, and a constant jaw popping that made me want to remove my own jaw, she is not even holding on by a thread.

The Babadook is visually stunning despite all Amelia’s distracting maladies, taking the most beautiful visual elements of an eerie and almost animated horror palette and psychological thriller ‘destroyer of your psyche’ suburban realism to explore the absolute depths of a relationship between parent and offspring.

It takes the “I love you but I hate you” guilt of parenthood to its absolute extreme, and in the vein of The Orphanage, a preternatural child spurs it on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szaLnKNWC-U
The film’s most disturbing moments are disparate and range from subtle — Amelia urging Samuel to sit in the tub with her fully clothed — to less so — hundreds of roaches crawling out of a wall, and this tension keeps you sitting on your hands throughout as you wait for the inevitable …. BABA DOOK DOOK DOOK DOOK

Sidenote: Director, Jennifer Kent, is best known for directing Babe: Pig in the City. Makes sense.