Mother of the Year

First glimpsed in a Edward Gorey-esque pop-up book, the titular monster is like an unholy combination of a vaudevillian clown and Jack the Ripper. Wild-eyed and widely grinning, he speaks mostly in croaked utterances of his own name, his long arms and pitchfork fingers reaching out of the darkness. He's a terrifying, ghostly menace.

But what sets director Jennifer Kent's debut film apart from standard creature features—and elevates it into the realm of horror art—is that even if this ghoul never appeared, The Babadook would still be a gorgeous, heartbreaking exercise in dread.

The spare, haunting and often tragic horror drama centers on Amelia (Essie Davis), a nerve-jangled nurse still reeling from the death of her husband, who was killed while driving her to the hospital when she was in labor. Seven years later, Amelia and her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), occupy a too-big home where Samuel lives in constant fear of monsters under the bed, to the degree that he keeps an arsenal of homemade weapons hidden throughout the house.

Amelia and Samuel's existence is lonely and sleepless. Samuel's behavior—which includes extreme sensitivity and violent outbursts—isolates Amelia from her upper-class sister and leaves the boy friendless and in constant trouble. The pair finds solace in nightly bedtime stories, until a mysterious and foreboding pop-up book—Mister Babadook—appears on the shelf. That kicks off a harrowing series of events that may or may not be real, with the book's villain insinuating himself into their lives, threatening to take control of Amelia and turn her into an instrument of murder.

It becomes obvious early on that Kent is working in allegorical mode, with Mr. Babadook representing the madness Amelia risks succumbing to. Her desire to nurture her child jockeys with an impulse to harm him—to punish him for robbing her of the life she once knew. It's a metaphor that could have come across as ham-fisted, and indeed, it sometimes hits with the subtlety of an ax to the head. Yet Kent handles her story with patience and confidence, allowing it to transcend its flaws.

The creature itself seldom emerges, appearing more often in visual cues—a coat and hat on a hook, for example. This puts the film in direct contrast with its closest relative, James Wan's Insidious, which also found a parent transforming into a threat to his child. But instead of Wan's in-your-face jump scares and fakeouts, The Babadook has more in common with The Shining, mainly because it's a deliberately plotted horror tale about the specter of mental illness. 

That's some heavy shit for a film about a storybook monster stalking a family, but The Babadook earns both its scares and its tears. Much of that is thanks to the strong performances. As Amelia, Davis looks as though her eyes could at any point sink into her hollow body. Moving from tender to terrified to terrifying—occasionally in a single scene—she has the resiliency of a tragedy-stricken mother and the vulnerability of a lost soul. And Wiseman, who looks like a Precious Moments version of Mick Jagger, keeps up. The young actor projects wide-eyed fear, weird-kid ticks and a wounded worldview without succumbing to the precocious-child stereotype.

But Kent is the main discovery here. The director allows much of her film to play out in the shadows, creating a sense of claustrophobic paranoia and lunacy that would make a young Roman Polanski proud. She's a storyteller whose voice and vision demand attention. The Babadook doesn't just tower over this year's other fright films: It's one of the most emotionally affecting pieces of macabre cinema in years.  

Critic's Grade: A-

SEE IT: The Babadook opens Friday at Living Room Theaters.

WWeek 2015