Parent trap

"The Babadook" explores the horrors of motherhood and mental illness.

If “The Babadook” (already the official winner of “Film Title Most Fun to Say Out Loud” award) were just a non-genre drama about a widowed mother on the edge of a nervous breakdown, it would already be a formidable first feature. But writer/director Jennifer Kent went one step further by crafting a fairly straightforward horror flick that is creepier than anything you’ll see this year (unless you’ve seen “CitizenFour”).

Seven years after the death of her husband in a tragic car accident, Amelia (Essie Davis) is a working, single mom raising her 7-year-old son, Sam (Noah Wiseman) in a quaintly gothic Australian burg. Sam suffers from some behavioral problems. He’s conversing with an invisible entity only he can see.

Amelia, working as a nurse at an old folk’s home, still hasn’t gotten over the sudden death of her husband after almost a decade. The sadness of that loss is still palpable and she’s ostensibly a spinster with only one cat and the weight of a seemingly delusional son on her shoulders. Worse, Amelia craves intimacy. But when a co-worker (Daniel Henshall), clearly digging her, makes the mistake of popping by for an unannounced visit, with flowers and a toy for the kid, he instead finds himself in the middle of an embarrassing meltdown.

One night Sam picks a strange pop-up book to be read before bedtime, Mr. Babadook, the dark tale of a spectral predator who makes no bones about straight fucking you up if you invite him in when he comes knocking. What follows is best left to the senses.

After a career in acting, Jennifer Kent interned with Lars von Trier (on his singular film, “Dogville”) and it’s her ability to capture a natural empathy for her characters, who are victims of circumstance in every way, that speaks to von Trier’s influence—especially when crushing forces threaten to transform them into something unrecognizable.

Kent almost effortlessly gets us on board with her characters. Better yet, she nails a dreadful, dream-like quality (captured by the haunting cinematography of Radek Ladczuk), evoking the Expressionism of David Lynch and the warmly relatable protagonists of a Stephen King novel in one deft stroke, while somehow melding that with elements of "Home Alone" and miraculously never losing control.

Despite being straight horror, “The Babadook” could easily be seen as a metaphor for the burden of motherhood and mental illness. Kent’s script and direction gracefully unspools the supernatural in ways that still align well with the real psychological terrors of something like Polanski’s “Repulsion.” Kent plays that narrative uncertainty to keep us off guard, not just for the jump scares (which are, thankfully, almost non-existent), but our own perceptions of reality—because, really, nothing is scarier than losing one’s mind.

As Amelia, Essie Davis turns in a battered and nuanced performance. She’s kind of an amalgam of Jack and Wendy Torrance from “The Shining” (to which, along with “Poltergeist,” “The Babadook” owes its most obvious debts). Most parents never want to admit that they sometimes wish their kids had never been born. That’s another line this film rides with the audience. Who doesn’t love their kids while occasionally loathing the life they’ve forced on you, at least sometimes? Davis and Wiseman, as Sam, are the film’s center and their chemistry is genuine and familial. Which speaks to the reality of how, when shit goes bad and you can’t sleep, no matter how much you love them, cathartic fangs will draw blood.

“The Babadook” is a refreshingly original, beautifully staged, very creepy, genre import that deserves a mainstream audience who, after a lackluster year for horror, probably don’t realize how much they deserve it.