The Babadook

Something of a sensation after it was released in Australia, The Babadook, written and directed by Jennifer Kent, is another film that has tried to reshape the horror film. It mostly succeeds, but I found the ending quite derivative, and after all is said and done, it isn't that great.

The film stars Essie Davis as a harried single mother of a troubled six-year-old (Noah Wiseman). Her husband, his father, died in a car accident driving her to the hospital to give birth. She has never really come to terms with her grief. The boy, Sam, has nightmares about monsters, and even makes contraptions to battle them. One of them, a sort of crossbow that shoots darts, gets him in trouble at school, so his mother withdraws him.

One night she reads him a book, and it's one she doesn't recognize, called Mister Babadook. It's a pop-up book about a top-hatted creature, and warns not to "let him in." After that, strange things start happening. She rips the book and throws it away, but finds it on her front porch, the pages glued back together.

As with most horror films of this type, the evil entity, in this case Babadook, is a metaphor. I think we can safely assume it is a metaphor for grief, or even death itself. At times it takes the form of Davis' husband. We start the film thinking that Sam is crazy, but it's really his mother who's off the boil, and she's the one that carries the Babadook inside her.

There are the requisite scares contained within, and thankfully no half scares (no cats jumping out of a closet). As usual, it does not pay to be a dog in a horror film (they recognize bad guys inside good guys, you know). And we also are reminded to stay out of the basement.

The last act is full of knives and ropes (the kid has a good way with knots) and one character I was sure would be a goner survives. But that last act was also very familiar. There's only so many ways you can pit a battle between a mother, her child, and a Victorian-draped demon.