Our Movie Review: The Babadook (2014)

Why we watched it: William Friedkin tweeted “I’ve never seen a more terrifying film than THE BABADOOK. It will scare the hell out of you as it did me.”

Our rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Our review:  Good horror movies are hard to find. Most movies that traipse with the horror tag simply think seeing blood and the violence of death are what scare the audience. A good horror movie works into your mind, letting your own imagination do the real work of finding the disturbing, the scary. For us, the scariest movies we’ve seen are The Exorcist I & III (not Exorcist II or the silly The Beginning or Prequel versions). These movies don’t use the tropes of quick cuts, figures popping out of shadows, overwrought sounds to scare us. These movies make you think about life, about death, and about the journeys between. So when the director of the Exorcist posts that a movie scares him, that is enough to intrigue.

After watching The Babadook, we completely agree that there is horror to the story of this widow and her son. The horror, though, is not the kind that keeps the audience gripping their chair, nerves dangling. This is not a movie where the fear of what happens next is scary–the scare is recognizing why it is happening. What scares us is the fear of a mother not loving her son and her fear of him (because, yeah, he’s a scary little dude), combining with her resentment toward him and the everyday weights that come with being a single mother, all alone. We are afraid to see where those feelings take her, and us. Because the movie effectively allows us to see her humanity, we know she is not a monster, and yet she (and we) can be monstrous. It doesn’t have to be something momentous that makes us monstrous, either. We can simply be.

The power of this film comes from the strong performance of the mother and the son. We see her struggling with her life and her feelings; and he is creepy, lovable and annoying, all of which feed the Babadook. The other strength of the movie comes in the assured direction. The strongest moments are in what we don’t see–such as the mother hiding under her bedsheets, hoping like a child that the “scary” will go away, a feeling that we can relate to. (Like that time when something was gnawing somewhere in our house – just … close your eyes and pretend it’s not there.)

What we learn in this very good movie is that that “scary” is not outside the covers, but underneath with us.