Kent: The Babadook (2014)

The Babadook is an Australian twist on the supernatural home invasion dramas that have become so popular in the wake of the Paranormal Activity franchise – or, rather, a South Australian twist, since it’s rare among recent Australian films in being set in Adelaide, which director Jennifer Kent paints in a peculiarly sparse, denuded light. Apart from a few fleeting side cameos, there are really only two characters – Amelia (Essie Davis) and her six-year old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) – or three characters, if you count the “Babadook,” a monster that Samuel and Amelia first encounter in a pop-up book that somehow turns up in his bedroom. In some ways, that book is the most terrifying part of the film – it’s suffused with that sadistic pleasure in frightening and traumatising children that you sometimes find in an older generation of picture books, stories destined to be relegated to the tops of bookcases. And while it’s quite predictable that the Babadook starts to migrate from the bookcase back into Amelia’s under-furnished terrace, the film is also quite original in that most of that migration happens during the daytime. Supernatural invasion dramas often revolve around the rhythm of waiting for nightfall, but Kent paints this sprawling terrace house with so many shades of grey that it’s often quite unclear whether it’s night or day – or day simply feels like incipient night, which works quite well with the insomniac angle that gradually takes hold. And, like the strongest insomniac horror, it’s something of an anechoic chamber drama – everything is suffused with that particular quietness that settles when you haven’t had enough sleep, or when your brain is starting to make up for missed dream-work while you’re still awake. From that perspective, the editing is perhaps the most crucial part of the film – it’s full of mismatches and odd cuts that suggest some maleficent microsleep has occurred between one image and the next, producing an eerie sense of something barely missed that’s never really assuaged or resolved. Perhaps that’s why the house sometimes feels like a regional broadband blackspot that’s somehow migrated into the inner city – there’s an omniscience that the camera can never quite access, a presence that’s never quite present, no matter how ingeniously or emphatically Amelia and Samuel try to domesticate it.