Babadook, The (2015) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Horror | Thriller

Tagline: If it's in a word. Or it's in a look. You can't get rid of ... The Babadook

Six years after the violent death of her husband, Amelia (Essie Davis) is at a loss. She struggles to discipline her 'out of control' 6 year-old, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), a son she finds impossible to love. Samuel's dreams are plagued by a monster he believes is coming to kill them both.
When a disturbing storybook called The Babadook turns up at their house, Samuel is convinced that the Babadook is the creature he's been dreaming about. His hallucinations spiral out of control, he becomes more unpredictable and violent. Amelia, genuinely frightened by her son's behaviour, is forced to medicate him.

Storyline: Amelia who lost her husband in a car crash on the way to the give birth to Samuel, their only kid, struggles to cope with her fate as a single mom. Samuel's constant fear of monsters and his violent reaction to overcome the fear doesn't help her cause either which makes her friends distance themselves. When things can not get any worse, they read a strange book in their house that talks about the 'Babadook' monster that hides in the dark areas of their house. Even Amelia seems to feel the effect of Babadook and desperately tries to destroy the book, but in vain! The nightmarish experiences the two encounter form the rest of the story. Written by PipingHotViews

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, March 19, 2015 -- Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Thanatologists and other similarly inclined academics, as well as a perhaps rather unexpectedly large swath of the general population, will no doubt recognize the above list as the famous model developed by psychiatric researcher Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her now iconic book On Death and Dying, a study which sought to elucidate the five stages of grief. The Babadook, an often brilliantly effective horror film, might add a symptom or two to that catalog, for while the film is on its surface a relatively rote depiction of a disturbed mother and her equally unbalanced child, underneath the roiling facade of the film is a rather potent exploration for what it means to continue existing in the wake of a tragic demise. The fact that The Babadook manages to convey such emotional weight while remaining fairly discursive about its subtext is just one of the ways this "little" Australian film neatly reworks horror tropes into something a bit more substantive than this genre typically tends to proffer.

In most cases, getting shocked out of a sound sleep by your kid who's just had a nightmare might be an unappetizing prospect, but for Amelia Vannick (Essie Davis), it's actually some welcome relief, as she herself suffers from a recurring nightmare, one that in fact begins this film in what turns out to be The Babadook's evocative if somewhat discursive modus operandi. It's obvious that something horrible happened to Amelia in a car, but as with so much else in this film, writer-director Jennifer Kent holds her cinematic cards rather closely to her vest, allowing the viewer to infer information rather than having it spelled out overtly.

The kid waking Amelia from her troubled rest is her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), a cute if somewhat odd looking little boy who is ensconced in that traditional childhood terror—a fear that a monster is in his bedroom. Amelia takes Sam back to his room and they undergo a search which (again, delivered through implication) seems to be something of a ritual for the pair. When Sam asks Amelia for a bedtime story to help settle his anxieties, Kent indulges in a bit of none too subtle delineation of just how disturbing many so-called "fairy tales" really are, especially if they're on the Grimm Brothers end of the spectrum.

It soon becomes evident that Amelia and Sam are two walking wounded, though initially at least it seems that Sam is perhaps the worse of the two. Amelia manages to make it through her daily rounds as an attendant at a local retirement home, but Sam is having a hard time at school due to his seemingly unstoppable fear that he's being stalked by a monster and his predilection toward creating defensive weapons to keep the boogie man away. In the meantime, Amelia makes a perhaps unwise decision one night to let Sam choose his own bedtime story, and he finds an odd looking tome that confounds Amelia, since she's not sure where the book came from. That, of course, is the book of the film's title, though it's notable that it's actually called Mister Babadook. Mister Babadook posits a really frightening specter who's intent on "getting in," and who it seems (at least in the book's not exactly Pulitzer Prize level poetry) will make you wish you were dead if he does get in.

It probably goes without saying that Mister Babadook does indeed start tormenting Amelia and Sam—or does he? The Babadook plays with perception and paranoia, as well as whether a supernatural incursion is actually happening or is simply the figment of a fevered imagination (or two), in a way that is more than a bit reminscent of The Innocents (based on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw). Is Amelia bonkers, projecting her grief over a devastating loss not only onto her helpless son but to an inchoate interloper from the beyond? Or is Sam the deluded one, a kid so beset by anxiety and remorse that he invents monsters as a coping mechanism? Or is something entirely more sinister, if decidedly less rationally explicable, actually happening?

To Kent's immense credit, The Babadook manages to make "all of the above" the most probable "answer" to the film's central quandary, and yet what's most remarkable about this film is that ultimately it doesn't matter what is happening, or even why. Whether or not the Babadook is a manifestation of the roiling, angst ridden psyches of mother and/or son is ultimately irrelevant. The Babadook is the "elephant in the room," so to speak, and ultimately it doesn't matter how it got there. As a symbol for the anchor like grief pulling Amelia and Sam down into the depths of despair, the Babadook is obviously incredibly redolent. But as a simple "monster under the bed," the Babadook is just as redolent.

Kent perhaps makes a few missteps in the film's closing moments. The Babadook, while bathed in shadows and never all that visible, is nonetheless more physically manifest here than in the rest of the film, which otherwise tends to deliver a surprising amount of shocks and scares with little more than oppressive knocking sounds flooding the soundtrack (this is one of the least gory horror films in recent memory). That element also plays out in the film's perhaps needless coda, where the omnipresence of grief attains a symbolic presence in the "subconscious" of the Vannick household basement. A few too on the nose symbols, including a meal of worms (an obvious referent to mortality), may just slightly undercut an otherwise brilliant examination of the psychology of loss. Kübler-Ross aficionados may want to take note and schedule a viewing of The Babadook as part of their learning curve.

With labels like Scream Factory and Severin part of my regular reviewing duties, I watch a lot of horror films, and sad to say many if not most of them are cut from much the same cloth, leading to much the same unambitious results. The Babadook is an incredibly refreshing change of pace, a film that traffics not in jump cuts, blood and guts and the like, but a rather moving analysis of a dysfunctional family unit trying to come to terms with loss and grief. The Babadook is often very frightening, but it's an organic fear, not one ginned up out of hokey effects and booming LFE (OK, there is some booming LFE in the film, but you get my point). Davis is amazing in the lead, and Wiseman is generally quite effective as the little boy. Technical merits are very strong, the supplemental package is appealing, and The Babadook comes Highly recommended.

[CSW] -4.3- An excellent horror movie that's so refreshingly unlike every other one you has been watching. Jennifer Kent's Babadook doesn't rely on cheap tricks, jump scares, horror clichés of any kind. It is a story and a kind of horror that you have to understand. It's a movie that's more than what is on the surface. I'll be honest, this film is for those that enjoy horror/thriller/suspense films. Be warned that initially this film doesn't provide us with a clear picture as to whether or not the protagonist is purely insane, and simply imagining everything, or if what's happening is truly real. While the film relies on it's thriller aspects for a majority of the film, the interwoven horror of the lead character questioning her own sanity stirs a pot similar to The Shining. It will truly challenge your thought processes as it forces itself into the suspense aspects where it takes twist after twist. You will begin to wonder where the film is really going. The suspense is palpable, enjoy it.
[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.

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