Though she admittedly is not looking to explore making horror films anytime soon, freshman director Jennifer Kent’s debut feature, The Babadook, is the one of the most promising first features the genre has seen in nearly a decade. It is simple, stylish, and wears its influences on its sleeve like a crown. Unlike many horror directors, Kent finds life amongst the darkness to craft a film that is at once very fantastic and very real. Or rather, maybe she finds the darkness within her characters’ everyday lives.
To begin, Kent is a true believer. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked her via phone earlier this month. Through a chuckle, she very assuredly replied “Yes. Of course.” She described some paranormal happenings caught on camera during the production of the film in the basement, where her film’s titular creature resides. “Oh, the Babadook is very much real,” she said describing it almost as a physical manifestation of the anxieties and fears of not only the film’s protagonist Amelia (Essie Davis), but those of every individual watching the film.
This keen psychological understanding is what makes The Babadook so effective and refreshing. Quite simply, it follows a single mother who struggles to raise her misbehaved young son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) after her husband’s passing seven years prior. After reading Samuel a pop-up children’s book about a shadowy creature called The Babadook, the two begin to see the creature haunt their lives, especially Amelia. After trying to convince herself and Sam that the monster is make believe, the creature feeds off of Amelia’s deep-rooted anxieties leading her to become increasingly hostile to her son, her sister and her neighbors.
Though she admittedly is not looking to explore making horror films anytime soon, freshman director Jennifer Kent’s debut feature The Babadook is the one of the most promising first features the genre has seen in nearly a decade.
“This is a film about how the Babadook affects those around you,” Kent said. “The story of the Babadook created itself from the story of Amelia’s struggles.” Those struggles that Kent is referring to are Amelia’s difficulties communicating with her child – played so perfect by Wiseman. Essie Davis plays her maternal lead with the fragility of a porcelain doll glued back together after falling from the shelf. Her careful restraint in the beginning of the film is at once heartbreaking and pitiful. She fears for her son’s obsession with hand-crafted weapons and magicians, but also begs of his school administration to give him understanding. It is this complexity – rarely seen in the horror genre – that accentuates the tension of the film’s first half.
Unfortunately, the second half of the film stumbles slightly. When the invisible threat of the Babadook becomes a physical reality, the story becomes rather dull and repetitious. It smartly doesn’t fall into the trappings and cheap scares of other exorcism films, but it it drags in it third act whilst Amelia’s demonic disposition takes over her body. What makes this half of the film really work is it ‘unique’ design, inspired by the classic silent films of Georges Méliés that Sam loves to watch in the film. “We wanted to create something real,” Kent says of the design, again emphasizing the tangibility of the terror. Ameila and Sam’s house was constructed on a stage to perfect a modern celebration of the early German Expressionist horror. Kent also said she even briefly considered shooting the film in black and white like the films of silent lore, but she settles for a gorgeous palette of blue and pinks.
Jennifer Kent’s dedication to this authenticity is quite deliberate throughout the film, but she speaks of it as if it all came very naturally. That is what makes The Babadook and Kent’s perspective so refreshing. It’s a genre film that taps into our psyche not to scare us, but to help us cope with our own anxieties about understanding people, being open and being comfortable getting older. Kent realizes that sometimes the scariest thing in life is ourselves and that is exactly what the Babadook is. “I don’t want to do a horror film again anytime soon,” she says, “but this story just felt right.” And The Babadook does. It is flawed – far from perfect – but, it is a twinkle in the dusty bag of garbage that is the current state of the horror genre. It is a confident look at what the genre can achieve, if a filmmaker believes in the ghosts on the theater screens.
The Babadook is in theaters this Friday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szaLnKNWC-U
