The Babadook combines an ominous picture book with a mother pushed to the breaking point, showing how creepy children’s literature can be.
The Babadook
IFC Films
Amelia's (Essie Davis) son is killing her.
But it's not his fault. Samuel (Noah Wiseman) is an expressive, odd little 7-year-old with round eyes and a gaping mouth, like a child's drawing of a face brought to life. He has, as his teachers call it, "significant behavioral problems," but they're of the sort that could just as easily be chalked up to rowdiness and a runaway imagination, rather than a more troubling problem. He likes magic tricks and builds homemade crossbows and catapults that get him kicked out of school. But for Sam, it's all about killing the monsters in the fairy tales he's read, all to protect his mom. Thoughts of those monsters, however, also keep him up at night, and he wakes up bellowing for Amelia, crawling into her bed and clinging until she peels his limbs away in order to get some space.
Amelia is a widow who works at a nursing home and is visibly struggling to hold her and Sam's life together at the start of The Babadook, an ingenious, moving, and fantastically creepy new Australian horror film that opens in New York and is available On Demand on Nov. 28. The movie is the feature debut from actress-turned-writer/director Jennifer Kent, and there's a distinctively female touch to the ways in which the story is a sort of waking nightmare before anything supernatural shows up. Amelia loves Sam, but raising him alone and trying to curb his behavior is eating away at her every resource. He's draining and suffocating her, and the more he acts out, the more those whom she depends on for help, like Sam's school or her sister Claire (Hayley McElhinney), pull away, leaving her exhausted and isolated.
Noah Wiseman and Essie Davis in The Babadook
IFC Films
One night, Sam pulls a red book Amelia's never seen before from the shelf, and they end up reading through a hair-raising pop-up tale about a creature called "Mister Babadook," a black-and-white figure in a top hat about whom the text warns, "See him in your room at night and you won't sleep a wink." It sends Sam into a fit of terrified sobbing, and after that, to Amelia's distress and frustration, he's sure the Babadook is haunting them. And yes, some strange things have been happening around the house, a blue and gray space full of dark corners that no lamp can ever seem to brighten. But aren't they just more signs of Sam's difficult behavior?
The Babadook, which was partially funded through Kickstarter, amps up the frightening events in some ingeniously lo-fi ways — like the reappearance of the book after Amelia repeatedly tries to get rid of it, or the barely discernible shapes that lurk in the shadows of the characters' bedrooms at night. The two lead performances are the film's most special effect, with Wiseman always toggling between adorable and awful in completely believable ways, and Davis slowly falling apart on screen, gradually losing the ability to fake a plastered smile and hold up a presentable front to the outside world, even when social services comes calling.
Kent drops us into Amelia's disintegrating mindset, showing how little sleep she's able to get between Sam's nighttime fears and her own worries. Eventually, she starts having her own night terrors as the idea that there might be someone or something malicious stalking them works itself into her brain. The camera looms up behind her or hides under the covers with her and Sam when neither can bear to check what might be above them. The hours melt away in sped-up montages when Amelia does finally get to sleep, so that she's always running late or having trouble dragging herself out of bed with the alarm.
No comments:
Post a Comment