Jennifer Kent (2014)
In the space of a few years, Jennifer Kent’s first feature has progressed from cult success to an apparently secure place in the horror-movie canon. Coming to it for the first time now, I therefore had to keep reminding myself of The Babadook’s humble beginnings. The film wasn’t done on a shoestring budget – $2m, according to Wikipedia – but Kent relied on crowd-funding, as well as Australian government grants, to get it made. Her screenplay develops the setting and theme of Monster, a ten-minute short she made in 2005, in which ‘A mother battles with her son’s fear of a monster lurking in the closet, but soon discovers a sinister presence all around her’ (IMDb). In The Babadook, the mother is Amelia Vanek (Essie Davis), a young widow living in Adelaide with her six-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Their days and sleepless nights are dominated by a bogeyman, so real to the boy that he makes weapons to fight the creature. Sam’s increasingly erratic behaviour leads to Amelia’s taking him out of school. At home, when she finds shards of glass in her food and questions her son, he blames it on ‘the Babadook’. ‘Mister Babadook’ – a long, pale, top-hatted figure whose fingers are talons that won’t let his victims go – is the title character in a pop-up book bedtime story that Sam insists his mother read to him. One night, in desperation, she rips the book to pieces. Next morning, she finds it reassembled on the front doorstep.
As in A Monster Calls (which, as a book predates and as a film postdates The Babadook), the supernatural bugaboo of the title is rooted in the real-life traumas of characters in the story. In J A Bayona’s 2016 screen version of A Monster Calls, the boy protagonist Conor’s interactions with the monster – a giant man-like shape formed from the branches of a yew tree in a graveyard – are related to Conor’s mother’s impending death. In Jennifer Kent’s film it’s almost immediately clear that the Babadook is connected to the death of Oskar, Amelia’s husband and Sam’s father, killed in a car crash as he drove Amelia, in labour, to the hospital where she would give birth to Sam. A Monster Calls dealt with facing up to a parent’s terminal illness. The Babadook is concerned with the overwhelming grip of bereavement – ‘the madness of grief’, to quote the title of Richard Coles’s recent memoir – that precludes ‘moving on’. At the start of the film, it’s Sam who’s evidently obsessed with a monster; as the story proceeds, it’s Amelia who emerges as the one seized and crazed by what’s happened in her life. The reassembled book contains new text that tells her that, if she continues to deny his existence, the Babadook will become stronger, and pictures of her killing the family’s pet dog Bugsy, Sam and then herself. Later on, Amelia has visions of murdering her son and sees an apparition of Oskar (Ben Winspear), who promises to return to her if she’ll give him Sam in return.
It’s easy to accept the emotionally complex fallout of a death as extraordinary as Oskar’s and Kent, who has said she wanted to ‘explore parenting and fear of madness’, does a good job of dramatising a surviving parent’s dread of becoming unable to continue to care for an already half-orphaned child. Grounding a fantastic tale in psychological plausibility brings its own problems, though, when the story is set in the present day. You wonder if Amelia hasn’t been offered bereavement counselling or, in view of his aberrant behaviour, why Sam isn’t seeing a child psychologist. Amelia’s conversation with his teachers (Tony Mack and Carmel Johnson) and, once he’s no longer attending school, visits to the house by social services (Cathy Adamek and Craig Behenna), make you wonder all the more. Kent doesn’t take the easy option of isolating the principals from the outset. Amelia has a job, in a care home for the elderly, where she gets on well with a friendly colleague, Robbie (Daniel Henshall). She has a sister, Claire (Hayley McElhinney), with a child of her own. Mrs Roach (Barbara West) is a concerned elderly neighbour. These links to the real world must, in due course, be lost or interrupted in order to focus on the story’s bizarre nuclear family – Amelia, Sam and the Babadook – and Kent disposes of some marginal characters more convincingly than others. Claire’s daughter, Ruby (Chloe Hurn), taunts Sam for having no father; he pushes her out of her tree-house and she injures her nose; Claire, who didn’t seem very sympathetic anyway to her sister’s plight, breaks off contact with Amelia. It’s harder to see why Robbie, after coming to the house and witnessing the tensions between Amelia and Sam, disappears entirely from the film.
By choosing eccentric-looking actors for roles both major (Sam) and minor (the social services woman), Kent puts strangeness on the surface. Essie Davis, who shoulders most of the acting load, may also be an instance of this expressionistic casting. Davis gives a committed performance but her frayed, almost fey presence means that Amelia is, from the start of the film, at the end of her tether: her psychological disintegration might have had greater cumulative impact with an initially more robust figure in the part. The odd appearance of some of the actors is, in any case, upstaged by the look of the title character (supposedly inspired by ‘the Man in the Beaver Hat’ in Tod Browning’s silent horror-mystery London After Midnight (1927)): Alex Juhasz was responsible for the brilliant design of the pop-up book and the images in the closing credits sequence.
Jennifer Kent cleverly keeps you guessing as what is and isn’t actually happening although, as with the psychologically credible basis of the narrative, that approach didn’t always work for this viewer. Possessed by the Babadook, Amelia breaks Bugsy’s neck. Once her madness subsides (relatively speaking), there’s nothing to suggest she imagined killing the dog or, assuming that she did, any emotional residue from this – for Amelia or Sam. Even so, Kent follows the climactic mayhem with a low-key ending that’s effective and disturbing. The monster isn’t banished from the house but locked in the basement; mother and son feed it earthworms there to keep it quiet. Once she’s given the creature his food, Amelia prepares for Sam’s birthday party. Mrs Roach is looking forward to popping by later, though it’s hard to imagine who the other guests will be. ‘Happy birthday, sweetheart,’ says Amelia to her son in the film’s closing line. Like her, we know only too well that it’s also the anniversary of his father’s death, that Sam shares a birthday with the Babadook.
15 December 2022
