Film Review: The Babadook (15)

If it's in a word or it's in a look, you can't get rid of the Babadook.

The Babadook is a 2014 Australian horror film and the strikingly accomplished first feature by writer-director Jennifer Kent. If you shy away from horror as a genre, however, be reassured this is as much psychological drama as monster movie - a film to engross, even as it unnerves. Although at points it is deeply unnerving.

The story focuses on Amelia (played by Essie Davis) and her relationship with Samuel, the son who was born to her on the day the boy's father died, en route to the delivery. Seven years later Amelia's sense of bereavement and loneliness is still tangible. Samuel, meanwhile, is fixated more than the average youngster on monsters under the bed, turning out an impressive line in improvised weaponry as protection and driving his mother to the edge of reason with his hyper-active paranoia. 

Things turn darker still, when Amelia discovers and shares a mysterious pop-up book - 'Mister Babadook' - a contender for least appropriate children's story ever set to paper. The 'Babadook' of the storybook's title is a spindle-limbed ghoul in a top-hat, which once invited into your home, so the book promises, will never leave. While Samuel's monster obsession intensifies in response, the sleep-deprived Amelia develops fears of her own. Her reassurances to her son that the Babadook is only a fiction ring increasingly hollow, as signs of a malevolent presence register all around her.

What evolves from this premise is one of the most satisfyingly grown-up horror stories I've seen in years, a tale rooted as much in deep-seated parental fears as in the threat posed by shadowy supernatural creatures. This is a story about a troubled mother-and-son relationship, as well as the long-term effects of grief. The nature of the Babadook remains tantalizingly ambiguous, but the notion that its existence might be rooted in one or both of the characters' psyches only serves to make it more terrifying.

Jennifer Kent's first-timer film-making is assured on every level, starting with the production design; Amelia and Samuel's world is a rambling home cast in a shadowy blue-grey that reflects the mother's bleak state of mind. The Babadook pop-up book has a macabre Gothic beauty that will make you want to own a copy (alright, possibly), while Mister Babadook himself (think the 1922 version of Nosferatu by way of the Brothers Grimm) appears with the less-is-more economy of the best monster flicks. As for the film's chill-quotient, Kent rejects cheap jump-scares and gore in favour of shrewd editing and eerie sound design, which combine to create a steadily escalating sense of menace.

Driving the film throughout, however, is Australian actor Essie Davis. Her performance as Amelia towers to Oscar-winning levels, or would do if the Academy paid attention to low-budget Aussie genre pics. Low-key desperation builds incrementally into frantic psychosis, every nuance of Amelia's fraying sanity playing out with a gruelling conviction, before culminating in something truly volcanic. Matching her admirably is young Noah Wiseman, with one of the more impressive child performances you're ever likely to watch. Samuel is successively winsome, excruciating and deeply vulnerable, the other half of a riveting double-act.

The Babadook is compelling from the off - intelligent and moving, yet unsettling and weird to its dark core. Its shows off its influences with pride - the Expressionist horror of the '20s and The Exorcist are both referenced, while the plot treads into the taboo territory of We Need To Talk About Kevin, with its complex mother-son dynamic. Everything is melded, however, into director Davis' own uniquely frightening fairytale, for an experience that stays with you long after viewing. 

The Mister Babadook storybook isn't lying. I first watched the film months ago and I still haven't got rid. Go on, let him in.