Is there any more romanticized relationship in our culture than that between mother and child? We are sold this notion that the bond between a mother and her child is immediate and intrinsic, a powerful love that lasts beyond reason or time. Even when the woman and child in question are not related, we are told that she will have a deep-set drive to nurture and protect said innocent.
But what if a woman doesn’t want to have a child? What if, having brought a life into this world, she finds herself unprepared and ill-equipped for the realities of caring for a child? And what if that immediate and intrinsic bond that we are told is so natural and so perfect, what if that simply doesn’t manifest? What if that love is not in-born, but has to be hard won?
These are the sort of considerations posed by writer-director Jennifer Kent in her debut masterpiece, The Babadook. An unrelenting experience in maternal horror, The Babadook explores the darkest corners of parenthood, conjuring an atmosphere of impenetrable dread as mother and child are locked in a war of wills that gradually erodes at the outside world until there is only the two of them and the grievous threat they pose each other.
And then the monster shows up.
The Babadook is the story of Amelia (Essie Davis), a woman who has never let go of her grief in the wake of her husband’s death in a car accident while driving them to the hospital so Amelia could deliver their baby. Cut to seven years later and Amelia is still moving in a fog, her every waking minute dictated by the needs of her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Samuel has grown up to be a pale and troubled little boy, petrified of the prospect of monsters and spending much of his time assembling home-made weapons in case any boogeyman should show up (his school is unamused when he brings such trinkets to class).
It’s easy to see why Samuel has grown up so sure of monsters, as the house he and his mother share is constantly suffused in shadow, filled with corners of inky blackness which threaten to swallow the characters should they lose their step. Tensions are thick between mother and child, tension that is only compounded when Samuel discovers a pop-up book detailing a creature called the Babadook, a hideous beastie that the book promises is creeping in the night, waiting to gobble up whatever boy or girl comes into its crosshairs.
As the Babadook begins to assert its will onto the house, The Babadook kicks into fear overdrive. Kent immediately proves herself to be a master of both audio and visual horror, loading up each scene with a malevolent chill. Kent shifts between tight close-ups on Davis and Wiseman, letting you see every contortion of fear and taxation of worry, and wide shots of their tiny figures surrounded by the empty expanse of the house or an uncaring outside world. The sound design only amplifies the fear, as otherworldly creaks and groans keep the characters on edge even when they are completely alone (the Babdook’s voice is a masterwork in and of itself, and Kent has politely declined to reveal how the trick was pulled off). With such forces assaulting them day in and out, both Amelia and Samuel are worn down to the nub over the course of the film, the actors appearing visibly beaten down and exhausted.
The Babadook works brilliantly as a creature-feature (the titular dapper demon resembles something Tim Burton might draw up if Tim Burton had any balls left). Kent’s true genius lies in the way in which she utilizes her fear-delivery system as a mechanism to better explore the tortured landscape of the mind. The Babadook is much less concerned with scoring cheap scares as it is in flaying open a tortured soul for all to see.
As the film progresses, it becomes more and more unclear whether we are witnessing a supernatural visitation or a woman’s mind fragmenting. Amelia, we learn, is a woman who is full to bursting with pain and rage, emotions which she has swaddled in a veneer of placid niceness for years. But, as played by Davis, we quickly establish that those resentments are never far gone from the surface. In her casual cruelty to the elderly people she cares for, in her disdainful defensiveness with the teachers at Samuel’s school, and in her every interaction with her concerned, confused sister, we see a woman who has defined herself as the victim of the world, a woman whose flare-ups of uncontrolled emotion pack a thousand times the charge as any supernatural assault.
The heart of Kent’s film lies in a slow reversal of empathy. We initially sympathize with Amelia as she slouches through one quietly slow-crushing day to the next, with Samuel and his tempestuous (possibly violent) nature as the source for much of her misery. We view her as a tragic victim of circumstance, and share her resentment for Samuel and the rest of the outside world. But as the film progresses and more and more cracks appear in Amelia’s psyche, it is Samuel who becomes the heroic presence in the movie. It is Samuel who is imperiled in the heart-stopping climax of the film, and it is Samuel and that same determination which so maddened his mother that provides the answer for how to battle the Babadook.
Kent refuses to let the audience off the hook by answering whether the Babadook is a true monster or merely a fiction which mother and son have used to disassociate Amelia’s madness. Davis, who cannot be praised enough for a performance which immediately enters the pantheon of horror cinema classics, manages to suggest years of repressed feeling coming to screaming life, scabbed over wounds suddenly bleeding fresh. More terrifying than the prospect that the Babadook is real is the prospect that it’s not, but mother and son have created a false-face for which to shelter from the truly diseased presence in the house.
The violence of The Babadook’s climax is all the more upsetting because of how it violates the notion of mother-child relations outlined in the first paragraph. Women, we are told, aren’t supposed to be unhappy with their children. They’re not supposed to resent, or even dislike, the life that they grew and birthed. Our society continues to insist that things such as post-partum depression are aberrant in some way, suggesting that women who are not immediately filled with love and rainbows for all children are monstrous outliers.
When Amelia is unleashed on Samuel, it is terrifying because we have come to understand the source of her violence, and to imagine such rage as being commonplace, justified even, is a violation of what society codifies mothers to be.
All of which makes the final resolution all the more powerful. The simple conclusion would be for Amelia to slay the Babadook and carry Samuel off into days of endless lollipops and sugar trees, while the fuck-you nihilistic ending would be for either Samuel or Amelia or be consumed by the monster. But once again, Kent proves to have an unerring eye for how to tell this story.
While I will not spoil the particulars of the climax, suffice to say that Kent beautifully depicts the idea that some monsters can never be defeated, but neither do they have to be victorious. We don’t kill our darkest selves, we live with them, and acknowledging that and moving forward only makes the beautiful aspects of life all the sweeter.
The Babadook, then, is that best kind of horror film. It takes you through Hell so that you might better define Heaven, highlighting that which is bleak and lonely in the world to illustrate why that which is joyous is so important. It peers deep into the darkness, but only so that is can better see the light.