‘The Babadook’

“The Babadook” is a horror movie about the things that haunt us in reality. It’s about the effects of grief, resentment and regret on the relationship between a mother and her son. Amelia (Essie Davis) and her husband get into a car accident on their way to the hospital to give birth to their first and only child. Her husband dies. She survives, as does her unborn son.

Years later, Amelia and her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), have an incredibly tense relationship. Samuel has hyper-imaginative tendencies, loves storybooks, and frequently mentions the circumstances of his father’s death to strangers. He does gleefully unaware of his mother’s forced smile and gritted teeth, as she tries to cope with her complicated feelings about her son, who only repeats the story because it’s his only connection to his father, whom he never knew. As their story unfolds, we come to understand that horror lurks in the shadows of reality, and not just in fiction.

That alone is such a strong base on which to effectively build a movie like this, for it gives a profoundly human weight to the story, which builds carefully and deliberately for a good hour before anything remotely supernatural occurs.

Then, one night, Samuel finds a strange and disturbing pop-up book called “Mister Babadook” on his bookshelf and asks his mother to read it to him. She does.

Then Mister Babadook arrives.

I’ll say no more, expect that whatever preconceived notions you may have about the horror genre, Kent’s film shakes them up, reassembles them and filters them through a frightening screen of humanity and understated horror with perfect grace and restraint. Inarguably, “The Babadook” is of the one the best horror movies made in the past decade. It’s a tour de force from Kent, who is an Australian first time writer/director, making this her big-screen debut—what an entrance.

To those two titles I would like to add rock star because she has crafted a stylish, scary and inventive film worthy of standing alongside the best work of Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski and John Carpenter, and she did it on a shoestring budget, proving once again the value of financial limits in filmmaking. I look forward to seeing her career unfold because, based on her first effort, I think she’s a true original.

For my money, Davis and Wiseman deserve the highest praise and if it were in my power, I’d hand over those gold statues to them immediately. The depths to which they reach to pull out these characters is astounding. Together, they inhabit this world with complete sincerity, and when they experience terror, we experience it with them.

“The Babadook” also calls to mind a wide spectrum of cerebral horror films, including flashes of F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” and Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” Using almost all in-camera effects, Kent develops a deeply nuanced atmosphere that somehow feels equal parts old-fashioned and innovative. I’m not kidding, she does some things here that will blow your hair back, and remind you what it feels like to be 8 years old and terrified of the monster under the bed… or in the closet… or in the dark, damp basement.

★★★★ (out of four)