2 out of 5

Directed by: Jennifer Kent

I really don’t mind movies that slip a deeper meaning beneath a genre cover.  I do mind movies that do this in a way that disrupts my enjoyment of the film by rather persistently pulling back said cover, and even moreso when this disruption subverts the genre under which it intended to hide.  Jennifer Kent’s ‘Babadook’ is trailered as a pretty spooky bogeyman flick.  It begins here – very effectively, with wonderful sound design and insanely awesome cinematography and sets that sell the shadows-in-every-corner vibe – but once the titular frightener makes its first appearance… much of the tension slips away.  Kent bucks some horror tropes early on, such as breaking out scares in the daytime; this can really shake up a movie in a positive way if toyed with, but instead there’s a lack of subtlety in ‘Babadook’ with the presentation that hints that maybe this won’t be a bogeyman movie after all.  Regardless of how much you want to read in to what is or isn’t going on, the latter half of the movie depicts the toll a relentless haunting can take on a single mother and son.  From a dramatic standpoint, Essie Davis as the mother Amelia and Noah Wieseman as her son Sam are both excellent, and damned true-to-life – testament to Kent’s script and her actors.  But we’re not going into this thinking it’s a drama, and the realism – a frayed, falling-apart mom, her hyperactive child – makes neither character much of an anchor for the viewer.  Again, these are things that can be manipulated in the audience’s favor if that’s the intention… I just don’t think that it was.  So while we get the horror setup as something of a bluff, Kent then moves us into more dramatic territory, occasionally waving frightening flags at us to keep the bluff going.  When Kent keeps things more suggestive or visually figurative – bugs, a sore tooth – it works, but more often than not the way the scares are handled signal that there’s not much for the viewer to worry about: that this is solely Amelia and Sam’s cross to bear.  If that dynamic plucks an emotional string for you, than I sense it’d be fascinating enough.  But most of the responses I’ve read that see the film from this angle are indirectly acknowledging that the movie ducks out of horror once you view it through this lens.  And if you continue to try and view it the other way, you’ll find that the script stalls in the latter half, refusing to build on the cool mythology it established and then even tossing it away rather effortlessly in its conclusion.  To be clear: ‘Babadook’ is a professional, bravely acted movie.  It’s a confident debut.  If the ‘deeper meaning’ works for you, then the film will probably work as well.  But as a horror movie, it isn’t the most effective execution.