Amelia Vanek and the Book on the Doorstep

Jennifer Kent’s feature debut puts a widowed mother, a six-year-old boy and a pop-up book in an Adelaide house and lets the three grind each other down. The Babadook runs 94 minutes. It premiered at Sundance on 17 January 2014, opened in Australian cinemas on 22 May 2014, and failed to become a commercial success at home before finding its audience abroad. It has since become a cult classic. It earns a 9.8 out of 10.

Trailer, via Umbrella Entertainment.

Amelia Vanek and the Book on the Doorstep

Essie Davis plays Amelia, exhausted and still grieving a husband killed in a car crash while driving her to the hospital in labour. Noah Wiseman plays Sam, her son, erratic at school, armed with homemade weapons against a monster he says is real. One night he asks her to read him Mister Babadook, a pop-up fairy tale that shows a figure in a top hat and suit and grows more menacing with every page.

Amelia rips the book apart and throws it out. It comes back reassembled at the front door, with new pages: pop-ups of her killing the dog Bugsy, then Sam, then herself. She burns it. The film never explains where it came from.

Glass in the Food, a Nose in the Garden

The scares are domestic before they are supernatural. Amelia finds glass shards in her food. She blames Sam. He blames the Babadook. At her birthday party, Sam’s cousin Ruby bullies him, and he pushes her out of a tree house and breaks her nose. Claire, Amelia’s sister and Ruby’s mother, tells her that even Amelia resents her own son. On the ride home Sam has a vision of the Babadook and a violent seizure. Therapy follows, and sedatives for the boy.

Kent wrote the screenplay in 2009 to work through parenting, grief and the fear of madness, and financed it with Australian government grants and crowdfunding. She shot in Adelaide and drew on her time as a production assistant on Lars von Trier’s Dogville. The production protected Wiseman, six years old, from the material. You can feel that care in the film: the horror is aimed at the mother, not the child.

What the $2 Million Bought

The Babadook cost $2 million and grossed $10 million. The money is not on screen and does not need to be. The creature — Tim Purcell under the suit — is a silhouette and a voice. The dread comes from a house, a hallway, a door, and a woman who has not slept in six years.

Why the Grief Is the Monster

The Babadook is not really about a monster. It is about a mother who lost her husband on the way to give birth and has spent every day since resenting the child who came out of it. Kent based the script on her 2005 short film Monster, and the feature keeps that short’s logic: the thing in the house is the thing in the woman. Every pop-up page is a threat Amelia has already thought.

That is why the awards make sense. At the 4th AACTA Awards the film won Best Film, and Kent won Best Direction and Best Original Screenplay. A horror movie about parenting almost never takes those prizes. The film was praised for its cast, its creature design, its premise and its themes, and the praise holds up a decade on.

What the Second Half Cannot Hide

The Babadook is a 94-minute film that does not waste a scene. Davis carries it. Wiseman is not cute and is not asked to be. The book is the best prop in modern horror because it is a children’s object that turns cruel.

The one real limitation is that the second half leans on the same trick — the monster appears, Amelia denies it, the denial costs her — more than once. It never breaks, but you notice the pattern.

Set that against everything else. A first-time director made a $2 million Australian film that failed in its own country and then became a cult classic on the strength of its idea. That is the part worth watching. The Babadook is not a jump-scare machine. It is a study of a woman who cannot get rid of what is in her, and it earns its reputation.

cult classic · Essie Davis · horror movies · Jennifer Kent · movie review · The Babadook