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If we’re honest, most of us who relish a good horror film don’t actually hope to feel something like horror. Instead, the appeal is that of shock and surprise, all candied up, the crowd-pleasing bits staged with the kind of extended setup/payoff patience that the makers of comedies have long forgotten: When will the gag hit, what will it be, and how will the heroine survive it? Indie or studio, well acted or campy, these movies feel like good-enough beers from the same reliable brewery.
Jennifer Kent’s maternal nightmare The Babadook, then, is an imperial stout that will have you walking funny — and it might rip into your sleep. It’s the most horror I’ve felt at a horror film since Neil Marshall’s The Descent, one where the scares don’t release the tension, they harrow. It’s hard to say whether you’ll enjoy this film, but it’s hard not to admire and respect it, if maybe with your eyes half shut.
Youngish widow Amelia (Essie Davis) is mother to creepy elementary-aged Samuel (Noah Wiseman), a kid that nobody wants to be friends with because he spends lots of time nattering on about a top-hatted, hunch-shouldered soul-eater called the Babadook who plans, he insists, to kill him and Mom both.
He gets wind of this beast from a marvelously creepy pop-up book that turns up one day in the house. An early scene of Amelia reading aloud from Mr. Babadook with increasing concern demonstrates Kent’s mastery of pleasurable horror as well as the tormenting kind. The book, designed by Alex Juhasz, has the handmade look of woodcuts and Edward Gorey drawings, only damned and demented; when its paper monster leaps out at us, in time with the meter of some threatening nursery-rhyme doggerel, it trumps other movies’ CGI terrors.
The suspense, early on, is delicious. Samuel upsets other kids with talk about the Babadook, which he seems to have seen outside the book, while Amelia tries to shake off the signs that her house has been targeted. She grows miserable and alienated, trapped in a drably colorless town with a kid who wrecks her every moment of peace. Eventually, Amelia and Samuel wind up as something like shut-ins — overmedicated, hiding out from a world that Amelia feels rejects them. But we know what she doesn’t: that the Babadook has seized control of her. Or maybe not.
As Amelia calls in to work, drugs her son and contemplates the murder of her dog, Kent seeds our doubts: What if the heroine — the mother, the traditional “final girl” — turned out to be the monster?
The film’s hard to shake, but it also demands a second viewing, and not just to pick out the clues about what is and isn’t meant to have actually happened.
