Summary: Six years after the violent death of her husband, Amelia (Essie Davis) is at a loss. She struggles to discipline her ‘out of control’ 6 year-old, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), a son she finds impossible to love. Samuel’s dreams are plagued by a monster he believes is coming to kill them both.
“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook...” While the quiet-quiet-BANG shocks of “cattle-prod” cinema continue to scare up big bucks in a wearyingly predictable horror market, how terrific to find a crowd-pleasing chiller that wants to do more than make you jump – to move your heart and your head, rather than just your body. Which is not to suggest that this Australian gem, which builds upon writer-director Jennifer Kent’s startling short Monster, is in any way lacking in the fear factor; on the contrary, there’s plenty here to make your skin crawl, your pulse quicken and the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention. But Kent’s nightmarish fairytale about enchanted books and accursed dreams works its frightful magic through our emotional engagement with its characters. To borrow a line from Pixar’s Monsters Inc: “We scare because we care.”
Essie Davis stars as traumatised single mom Amelia, haunted by memories of her husband’s death in a car crash en route to the maternity ward. Six years after the accident, troubled young son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) is struggling with demons of his own, obsessed by the spectral monsters he sees lurking in every shadow, against whose creepy advances he has fashioned a series of homemade weapons.
When Sam asks Amelia to read him a bedtime story, she finds a previously unseen volume on his shelf, a pop-up book of an extremely Grimm nature (think a kids’ version of the flesh-bound volume from The Evil Dead) about the bat-like Mister Babadook – a cross between Max Schreck’s Nosferatu and The League of Gentleman’s Papa Lazarou – who gives both mother and child the creeps. Attempts to lose, hide or even burn the offending volume prove fruitless, and soon both Amelia and Sam are seeing – and hearing – the distinctive “Ba-Ba-DOOK” everywhere; a hideous stranger in their increasingly haunted house.
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