Not to put too fine a point on it, but The Badadook is one of the most emotionally devastating horror movies I’ve ever seen.
It’s quite a brilliant film that manages to be both a dark, heroic fairy tale and a grimmer-than-grim slice-of-life family drama about an overworked mother who tries, but can’t cope with her eccentric son’s disturbing behavior anymore.
It’s also about a terrified young boy who’s mother might be going insane.
Amelia (Essie Davis, who shines like a young Jessica Lange) is the harried widowed mother of Samuel (Noah Wiseman), a clever but damaged young boy who doesn’t fit in at school or with friends. Amelia’s husband died in a car accident on the way to the hospital the night she gave birth, so she too has a dark cloud of unresolved issues that follows her around like a nervous dog.
Mother and son clearly love each other, but their life is difficult, to say the least. One night, during the evening bedtime story, Samuel selects the wrong book and an evil spirit is loosed in the house.
As if they didn’t have enough trouble…
The combination of Amelia’s waking, working nightmare of a life, and the additional strain placed on her by the malign presence that’s settled in her home creates an unrelenting pressure cooker that would crumble a commando.
The Babadook is without gore and very little violence, yet it’s brutally draining, recalling both Polanski’s Repulsion and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist for its merciless plunge into the sea of madness.
Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent presents us with a tale that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone, because she had the nerve to invent two characters who are believable, likable, sympathetic—and profoundly haunted.
True, in the past, I’ve griped about movies that waste time on character development when all we really want is mayhem. The Babadook is exactly the opposite. It’s a realistic character-driven story in which we hope that misfortune can be averted because we’ve grown emotionally attached to the protagonists.
The bottom line, that bad things happen to good people, is more horrifying than a thousand dead campers.
horrificflicks.com 