We open with our heroine, Amelia, having a few out of body experience involving a car crash and a man. She awakes from what is a dream by her shouty son, Samuel. Samuel is a handful to say the least what with all his monster sightings and his elaborate machines for attacking them.
His monster alerts are written off as a product of his over active imagination, but we’ve seen the poster!
One night he asks to be read from an unfamiliar book called ‘Mr Babadook’. This book has creepy illustrations and promises that the reader will end up dead - ‘The World’s Diggiest Dog’ this is not! Samuel is rightfully scared by the book but Mum’s patience starts to wear thin when he starts spotting the Babadook all over the place.
Small signs start to appear that suggest things are not right such as doors opening and glass in the soup. Amelia speculates that Samuel is the cause of the upsets but soon changes her tune when she starts to see the Babadook herself.
As her world slowly crumbles and with the social workers at the door we have to wonder if the monster is real or if Mum is just plain nuts.
This is an interesting psychological horror that has a cracking performance from Essie Davis at it’s heart. The boy; not so much! She starts off well as a struggling widow but slowly descends into a haze of mental instability and curse words. Some scenes are genuinely uncomfortable as she berates her son and sorts out the dog for one woof too many.
It’s left deliberately unclear as to whether the Babadook is real or just a symptom of Amelia’s mental state. Even when he’s seen it’s often just a flash or immediately followed by the character waking up, so you are unclear if it’s a dream or not.
The design is great with the original story book monster wonderfully realised in jerky animations on screen. I liked it when Mum was eventually possessed, that she too had the same staccato movements as the evil Mr B.
The struggles faced by Amelia were well realised with her bitchy and insensitive fellow Mums being no use and the prospective boyfriend being scared off by the screaming Samuel - and no wonder.
The po-faced authority fugues such as the police and the social workers were no help at all and the whole thing was a great essay on isolation and the struggles faced by young widows who face real monsters wearing hats.
There were the usual false starts and jump scares, but it was good how the pretences were dropped after an hour or so and the film became a struggle for survival. It wasn’t always clear if this struggle was in Amelia’s head or with a real monster but the resolution was well handled with the colour palette brightening up in the last scene. And they have a new pet too!
Best Bit : Bring me the Boy! 71%
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