In my discussion of Past Lives, I mentioned the ever-growing list of films I’ve been meaning to watch with my brother and why I’ve taken so long to get through that list. That situation explains why I finally just watched The Babadook (screenplay by and directed by Jennifer Kent) with my brother about ten years after it was released at Sundance. I’m really late to the party on this one. I hope a testament to the film’s brilliance is that, as a decade-late first-time viewer, I think it’s one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen.
Kent’s direction is incredible. I love the soundscapes of insect noises and strange whispers that build and then stop without warning. And of course, the loud knocks and scrapes are the kind that shake the viewer’s bones. Her execution of the scenes of the mother Amelia (Essie Davis) floating before crashing onto her mattress powerfully create a sense of disorientation. And her use of light and shadow to reveal and obscure terrifying beings is skillful.
I also commend the brilliant acting of Essie Davis as the single mother whose husband died driving her to the hospital as she was about to give birth to their son. As a fan and writer of horror, I have noticed that grief and sorrow are prevalent emotions in the genre, alongside fear and terror. This makes sense for a genre that so frequently meditates on death. Seven years later, Amelia still hasn’t recovered from her real-life nightmare. Her anguish, distress, and repressed anger and sorrow are written all over her face, and Davis conveys her feelings so vividly. Added to this is her sheer terror when the Babadook crashes into her life makes the blood run cold. I’ve discussed the impact of close-ups before. In this movie, the close-ups trap the audience with Amelia’s anguish, anxiety, and fear.
Also, I commend the performance of Noah Wiseman as Amelia’s son Samuel. In the first act of the film, he’s the source of much of Amelia’s suffering. He’s a concentrated bundle of anxious energy that often emerges in the most disastrous ways, from bringing homemade weapons to school to breaking his cousin’s nose in a fight. And then, when the threats to his life become immediate as the terror in the film escalates, my heart breaks for him as I watch him curled up in the corner and hiding in the shadows.
This is such a rich film that grapples with so many themes: grief, motherhood, childhood. I know so much about this phenomenal film has been written. In this discussion, I am going to focus on how the film presses on one of my personal deepest fears: the unreliability of the mind.
One of my favorite aspects of the horror genre is how it employs metaphors to powerful effects. These metaphors don’t have to be subtle to be potent. I keep going back to one of my all-time favorites, Frankenstein; in that novel, Victor’s creation serves, among other functions, as a metaphor for the risks of rapid scientific progress that sidelines morality. A more recent metaphor that is so striking in its power is the sunken place from Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, which represents the way in which Black people are stripped of their autonomy and agency by white supremacist society.
In The Babadook, the title creature is a metaphor for Amelia’s unprocessed grief over the death of her husband, which has built a wall between her and her son. The pop-up book that introduces the Babadook makes references to letting the creature in, allowing it into the home or into one’s being. After Amelia rips apart the book, she finds it on her doorstep with a warning that, if she continues to reject the Babadook’s existence, it will cause her to kill her dog and Samuel. This is a clear representation of how repressed painful feelings can lead to destructive bursts. The pop-up book also warns that the Babadook’s final form is so terrifying that the witness will wish for death; in the film’s climax, Amelia sees the Babadook take the form of her departed husband, who speaks the last words he spoke before he died in the fatal car accident.
The clarity of this metaphor does not take anything away from its force and its tragic implications, one of which is the fact that Amelia’s unresolved grief has caused her to not be the best mother she could be for her son. A clear indication of this is Amelia refusing to celebrate Samuel’s birthday on its proper day because that day is also the anniversary of her husband’s death. There’s also a moment that broke my heart when I saw it; one night before bed, Samuel tells his mom, “I love you,” to which she unenthusiastically says, “Me, too,” instead of saying “I love you, too.”
This is such a heavy, heartbreaking film, as well as a terrifying one. What I’m going to focus on now is the reality of the Babadook’s existence in the world of the film, which is eerily left undefined.
Yes, the creature is a metaphor, but in the characters’ world, ambiguity clouds whether or not the creature even exists. As a viewer, I wonder if the characters have imagined the creature into existence. Samuel has a vivid imagination and fears the presence of monsters under his bed and in his closet well before he reads the book about the Babadook. Amelia has trouble sleeping, and this causes her dreams and waking life to bleed into each other. A chilling interpretation of the film is that Samuel conjures the monster to explain his mom’s distant and harsh behavior, which is the result of her repressed grief. As his behavior causes stress on Amelia, she acts out aggressively. For example, another heartbreaking scene is when Amelia lies in bed, exhausted, trying to sleep. When Samuel walks in and asks for food because he’s hungry, she lashes out and calls him a little shit. When she goes to him full of regret, she says that her exhaustion has caused her to act in a way she never would have otherwise.
This scene foreshadows one of the most frightening sequences in the film, but before I discuss that, I want to discuss the second-most chilling scene, in my view. Samuel wants to leave the house and sleep at his neighbor’s place. When Amelia forbids him from alerting the neighbors in an attempt to dismiss the Babadook but later finds him on the phone with the neighbor, she cuts the phone line with a knife. She emphatically asserts that there is no Babadook as she brandishes her knife in front of Samuel. In that moment, I remember thinking: Samuel is trapped in the house with a monster, the one his mom has become.
The most frightening sequence in the film happens a few minutes later. Amelia experiences a vision with her deceased husband and the Babadook, but in Samuel’s eyes, she has fallen asleep in front of the television and has dreams so distressing that she’s convulsing in her seat. When the family dog rouses her from her state, she kills the dog with her bare hands. Then, she implies that she is going to kill her son before chasing him to his room and knocking the door down when he locks it. She tells her son that she wishes he died instead of her husband, that she imagined bashing his head against a wall to kill him. Samuel cries that Amelia isn’t saying these things, but instead the Babadook who has taken over her is. Whether or not the Babadook is real or a conjuration of their minds, the truth remains that Amelia has embodied the monster.
The rest of the film has scenes reminiscent of an exorcism story, with Samuel tying up Amelia as she purges the Babadook out from inside her. The movie ends on a complex note that is neither completely happy nor horrible, with Amelia renouncing the Babadook and banishing the creature to her basement. She and Samuel gradually build a healthier relationship. However, Amelia still periodically goes into the basement to feed the Babadook worms, and the fact that the Babadook is never shown in this final moment allows the ambiguity surrounding the creature’s existence to remain until the very end.
Either the monster possessed Amelia, or the monster was Amelia’s inner darkness bursting out. The second interpretation connects to a pressure point for me, to one of my own deepest fears, which I mentioned earlier: the unreliability of the mind. We use our minds to navigate the world, to engage with what we perceive as reality, but what if we lose our grips on our minds? What if our minds cause us to believe and see things that aren’t real, and we end up doing and saying things we otherwise wouldn’t have? The interpretation of the film that I have laid out is the result of my own point of view, shaped by my own experiences. I have struggled with depression, anxiety, and OCD during my life, with the latter two still having small traces in me today. My experiences have made me feel how little control one could have over one’s mind.
The fragile grip over the mind is just one of the multiple real terrors the film grapples with. Others include the terror of raising a child, the terror of growing up, the terror of losing a loved one suddenly and shockingly. All of this is to say that this film is a masterpiece of the horror genre. I cannot wait to rewatch it and ponder its ideas further.
After just one viewing, it has already begun to haunt me. For a horror film, that’s the highest praise.
Very vivid review of the movie. Great job
I love your point about the Babadook's "final form"!