REVIEW: The Babadook
“I underestimated this horror movie, the debut feature written and directed by Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent.
It is the finest and most genuinely provocative horror movie to emerge in this still very-new century. Both a relentless psychological thriller with heavy primal stuff on its mind and a full-throttle slam-bang scare-fest, it delivers raw sensation without insulting the intelligence.
In The Babadook, a sense of urgency establishes itself immediately in a nightmare scene in which Essie Davis’ Amelia is being rushed to the hospital…and this really is a nightmare scene. The urgency is over, the child she was being rushed to the hospital to deliver is now in early elementary school. And the father is dead, killed in an accident during that trip to the hospital. And the child, a little boy, is a pip. Samuel (the cherub-faced Noah Wiseman, giving one of the most amazing and intense child-actor performances I’ve ever seen) spends a lot of time playing games and concocting crude weapons with which to protect himself and his mum from imaginary enemies, and he’s at work on this project day and night, loudly. When his vigilance isn’t literally wreaking havoc on the small house within which he and Amelia live in near-isolation, Sam is a needy clinger who won’t let his mum sleep. He’s a terror at school and he very nearly kills his cousin. The situation’s a nasty mess, and Kent really makes the viewer resent little Sam about it, particularly after little Sam discovers a rather malevolent children’s book that warns of the evil household influence of a nasty man called, yes, The Babadook.
Kent’s directorial strategy is a marvel. In the first half of the film, she tells the story through the increasingly bleary eyes of Amelia. Once the ostensibly nonexistent Babadook starts making himself known —most devastatingly in a car rearview mirror incident that provides one of the film’s most jarring and viscerally potent sequences—it becomes Amelia’s turn to play the part of the monster. The heretofore intractable Sam begins to come off as vulnerable as he actually IS, while Amelia’s animus toward her son takes on what you might call supernatural proportions…” more.
SOURCE: RogerEbert.com