Recencies van critici

Whether it has enough narrative material to fill 95 minutes is debatable, but that's never stopped up-and-comers before. Jennifer Kent clearly studied her vintage Polanski thrillers, not just for the claustrophobia, horror, and paranoid hallucinations, but for the morbid sense of humor. (It also can't be a coincidence that the maternal heroine bares a striking resemblance to Mia Farrow, Rosemary herself).

Wake in Fright may be the quintessential Australian film and some may argue that it is, in its own way, a horror film. The Babadook however, shifts perceptions and let us in on a version of the country rarely screened... A psychological mind bender that tackles the horrors of motherhood in the face of isolation and gendered expectations, The Babadook stands out as one of the best horror films of the past decade.

The film sets up at least three explanations for its horror: rational-psychological (it's all in the mother's head); supernatural (there really is a bad spirit); and something in-between (dead Dad in the basement needs to be grieved). It keeps hopping from one level to the other, depending on which effect it needs: shock, pathos, 'art film' resonance. But this is (for me, at least) too much hesitation, too much equivocation; there is no centre to the movie, only endless 'switchings'.

The Babadook is a boldly difficult film to watch, as it connects one directly and inexorably to a mother's sense of hopelessness and to her blossoming hatred of her son. It often feels as if director Jennifer Kent is on the verge of exposing something deeply taboo and unnerving about the ugly primordial emotions that parents must suppress in order to raise their children, and this is her greatest achievement.

As unsettling as David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE and as claustrophobic as Roman Polanski's REPULSION, Kent's directorial feature debut is a much needed adrenaline shot to the arm of the horror genre; a film that owes more to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Mario Bava, and Dario Argento than to the recent trend towards torture porn.

To these eyes, the only thing that really distinguishes [The Babadook] or elevates it (slightly) above the studio-financed spawn of James Wan is that it wears its thriftiness like a merit badge while also politely declining the brutal violence and gore usually favoured by cheapjack genre filmmakers. These strategies give the impression of seriousness and subtlety. But, like the canted camera angles favoured by Kent's cinematographer Radek Ladczuk, it's a carefully forced perspective.

These complex emotions inform Kent's sympathetic survey of depression and parental angst, but they also serve as an unfortunately literal explanation for the monster's presence. What began as an enigmatic, polysemous force is dumbed down into an unimaginative metaphor, hindering the film's capacity to provoke true fear.

Sometimes you go to a movie and know from the first image that whoever made it knows what she's doing. You don't need convincing. You're there with her. Jennifer Kent'sThe Babadook is like that. It's her first full-length film, but it's made with ruthless intent. The editing comes in quick, sharp slaps. She doesn't waste a panning shot. Kent keeps you on edge for 93 minutes.

With this frightening, seemingly simple story of a children's book monster come to fearsome life, Kent burrows into the mindscape of two people—a mother and son—contending with delayed post-trauma; it's an intelligently conceived and surprisingly poignant character study that never sacrifices any of its scares as it grasps for drama.

[It] is, in my opinion, the finest and most genuinely provocative horror movie to emerge in this still very-new century. Both a relentless psychological thriller with heavy primal stuff on its mind and a full-throttle slam-bang scare-fest, it delivers raw sensation without insulting the intelligence the way the more sensationalist but also essentially trite pictures in the New Horror Paradigm along the lines of "Insidious" tend to do.

A spooky, powerful exploration of murderous maternal rage, writer-director Jennifer Kent's domestic-horror movie The Babadook satisfyingly pierces the obscene sanctification of "mommyhood"—a pathological mandate that seems to have become an irreversible cultural imperative.

Few horror films equal [The Shining]—or now, indeed, [The Babadook]—for intelligently addressing terror's source in childhood-related nature of terror, and for depicting the family as an inescapable place of terror rather than a shelter from it. Among bad-parenting frighteners, The Babadook earns a place of honor, steeped as it is in a history not just of horror cinema, but of Freudian interpretations of horror narrative in general (you can bet Kent is up on her Bettelheim).