Mommie Dearest

There are real monsters,  and then,  there are REAL monsters.

Jennifer Kent’s haunting and poignant The Babadook (2014) dresses up in  a cookie cutter costume. It sets up to be a boogeyman tale, spooks in the closet, a young boy terrified of monsters we cannot see. But in his world, living a broken life with his widowed mother (Essie Davis) clearly at the end of her rope, Samuel (Noah Wiseman ) has the ultimate villain to face.

Mom Amelia’s husband died in a car accident on the very day Sam was born.  Amelia struggles to make ends meet and keep life together amidst her obvious grief and depression. Sam is a troubled boy, prone to tantrums and outbursts,  serving to further alienate this family from others. The pair lose increasingly more sleep as Sam’s anxiety mounts, and he invades mom’s space and privacy endlessly.

Then a storybook appears as if from nowhere. A nightmare tome called The Babadook. Eerie monochromatic pictures illustrate a violent tale in which a looming figure seeps into your home, into your life, and into yourself. ‘You can’t get rid of the babadook’.

Sam freaks out, and his terror takes over the duos lives, isolating them even further.

But strange noises,  peculiar dreams, hallucinations of a haunting creature, clothed in black mount, and before long, the babadook is something that even Amelia can’t ignore.

The Babadook, though rife with metaphor, gives viewers a ‘real’ monster to fear, one looming in the shadows in menacing wait. The classic and valuable horror elements; gloomy tone,  suspense,  dark corners and heart pounding music. There IS a typical storyline here, but what makes it so unusual is the way in which fantasy and reality are entwined,  making you wonder was it ever a fantasy at all?

The real monsters? Grief and fear, anxiety and desperation.  A broken woman trying to raise a child while drowning in her own pain and inevitably dragging her son down with her.  A mother out of options, struggling to maintain some semblance of a life. But anger and resentment begin to build, to grow,  to evolve. These emotions overtake her, they become something more, something much more sinister.

Horror fans have grown comfortable with seeing a parent turn on a child, but commonly, we see fathers inhabited by demons, Jack Torrance parading after his family with an axe.

But mother is so often our sanctuary. She is the safe zone, t he voice of reason,  the ultimate good.

Perhaps this is what makes The Babadook a film that will get under your skin on more levels than one.

Rife with symbolism, beautiful set design and excellent acting, The Babadook is a horror like nothing we’ve seen in recent years. It has heart and horror,  and an evil we can all relate to.

After all, we all have demons, but for the most part  they’re ‘quiet today’.