Review of The Babadook (2014) by Ryan C — 26 Oct 2015

This movie either had me bored and wishing the kid would hurry up and get killed or laughing hysterically at the multiple points of unbelievably ridiculous plot points. The first of which being: there's nothing scary about a pop-up book.

Nor does it make any sense that they would have such a book in their home, which leads the viewer to believe that perhaps the Babadook itself placed the book inside the house, but then if it had that kind of power at that point why didn't it just kill them then instead of making us endure another 55 minutes of that obnoxious, screaming kid and his incompetently grief-stricken mother? I feel that this is the least amount of work one could possibly put into making a "horror" movie.

The script is loose, barebones, unimaginative blandness that relies entirely on jump scares and sound effects to have any sort of impact. On its own the script reads more like a dark comedy than a horror film.

A three foot tall Edward Scissor Hands in a top hat somehow has the resources to make a children's book and leaves it in the home of a widow and her son, who then read it and become so terrified that they destroy the book and lash out at everyone around them for the next few days.

Then the book comes back, with a new section of the most laughably silly pop-up animation that seems like it would require eight different people all pulling on various tabs of paper simultaneously to work, pushing the mother over the edge and causing her to break the dog's neck and try to stab her son.

It all builds up to this foolish non-ending in which the mother just stands there screaming at the top of her lungs, something so terrifying to this murderous demon gentleman that it runs into the basement and becomes their new POV pet, subsisting off of worms and inexplicably causing one garden rose to grow in black.

Nothing about that set-up is scary. The only "scary" things are the cheap use of startle tactics, where half the room has been made pitch black with CGI and all the sound drops off and then BARRRGHHH something jumps into the foreground, and the one audio clip they recorded for the Babadook, of some guy saying "Baba dook, dook, dook" in an ever increasing inhale scream, an audio clip that is reused any time the babadook is on screen like some sort of metalcore Wilhelm scream.

This film could work if it were shot in a more consistently experimental style, with the Babadook being a metaphor for the pain and grief inherent in losing a loved one. But as it stands, it's a bland and boring movie with a few moments of so bad it's funny entertainment.