You just need to let him into your house…
This is indeed one of the better horrorfilms I’ve seen this year, but mind your expectations if you haven’t already seen this. Because it is nowhere near as good as the first trailer or the photograph earlier in this thread. This is a solid horrorfilm, not a great one.
Apparently you don’t actually need to invite it in.
The good news is you can puke him up and lock him in the basement. Problem solved, apparently. Also, since I have the spoiler tag going…
That kid was more relentless than was required. I almost needed a week’s vacation after watching that.
The sound design was… Totally uninspired. This really is a pretty good horrorfilm, but I wouldn’t have to look far to find ten with better sound design.
Given such a playful and child-like introduction, Mr. Babadook is a strictly by the numbers sort of boogeyman. I was expecting a dash of childlike with a sprinkling of absurd beyond Mr.B’s book. Sadly the closest thing to it was Mr.B’s reduction to something mewling & worm-eating at the very end.
Finally, I kind of wonder how the house didn’t collapse on the lot of them. Not that the house collapses in any of the other 50 million horrorfilms that has the Shake-The-House-Apart scene, but perhaps it should in the next one.
My take
Spoilers Part Deux
The kid was overly active, but I think that was because we were experiencing him through the filter of the mother. Everything she experienced was heightened by her emotional state. The camera throughout the film is firmly focused on her world, and we’re forced to experience her son in the same way she does. But yeah, that kid was perfectly cast as I kept hoping she’d leave him at a mall at some point.
As for the Babadook itself, I subscribe to the belief that he’s not real. He’s an internal manifestation of the mother’s depression that she’s convinced her son to believe in. Remember what she tells the ladies at her niece’s birthday party about her former careers? One of them was children’s book writer. The book she “found”? I believe she wrote it.
And that final scene? I think it’s meant to show us that she’s learned to live with her depression and sense of loss, to finally let go of her dead husband and move on. One can never totally eradicate that profound sense of loss, but one can compartmentalize it, learn to live with it. And I think that’s just what she’s done in those closing moments.
Although I did read another theory that was quite a bit more bleak that makes some sense as well. In that one, she’s the mother who murdered her child in the news cast we hear on the tv in the background in one point. If you watch closely, there’s a scene in which the news camera focuses for a second on an insane face in a window…a face that looks a lot like the mother.
So the ending in that one is purely in her head. She’s murdered her son and is most likely living in an insane asylum.
But I like the former explanation more. Even if it does defang the Babadook a bit for me.
I never actually considered your interpretation, but it makes even more sense than the second interpretation (which is the one I had arrived at).
As for the kid, I get the why. My point was that is is not just beyond obvious, it reaches a point where unless you’re expecting a really good pay-off, it just becomes too hard to watch. And as you might have guessed, I didn’t really feel I got that pay-off.
But to be totally fair, it was just not the film I expected it to be.
I think hype lessens the impact of many great films for me. It’s a nasty catch 22 as I usually only find out about these types of films (foreign films or smaller indies that normally won’t find their way into the larger theaters) from the hype. That’s not to say they’re aren’t great films. It’s just that all things can suffer from too much of it.
Whoa, loved this movie. It was intense. Love the obvious expressionist overtones (the muted blue and black color palette inside the house was a dead giveaway that this was a heightened world…certainly not a sane, normal existence).
And good lord, that kid was an amazing actor. I’m not sure I want to see it again soon, but I loved the experience once.
Yeah, the kid did really well.
I have my own ideas, but how did people interpret the tooth? She has a toothache building up to the climax, she rips it out … Then what? Was it just a red herring, or did it symbolize something deeper?
A nagging thought, made better by acting on it, essentially the killing of her dog and child writ small.
Babadook! Babadook! Will you do the fandango? Awfully sorry, everytime I see the title of this movie I hear Queen. Still I do like the idea and will definitely put this in my queue, so I’ll probably watch it in 5 years or so.
Watched this last night with my daughter. We both liked it a lot. As a parent I totally understand wanting to strangle your kid. I’ve always said that kids are lucky that we love them or they would never survive childhood. I like how the kid has alienated the mom from her support network so that when things go to shit she has nobody who even wants to deal with her and her awful son.
There was a really creepy scene near the beginning where the boy is hugging his mom and she finally says, “Stop that!” when it goes on a little too long. This struck both my daughter and myself as odd, but I wonder if he was doing something unconsciously sexual to her. Maybe it was just an early indicator of her likelihood of snapping from the pressure.
The end is weird and I can buy into the theory that she actually did kill her son and the dog. However, I like to think of it more like a Grimm’s fairy tale and that things just worked out the way they did. A world where a book’s character comes to life is already surreal, so why would it be implausible that things did work out as they did? It’s funny how we want reality in a story that is clearly unreal to begin with.
The best part was after it was over and my daughter asked me if there were any more horror movies that I had heard were good. Made me smile.
Just watched the short, “The Monster” (linked on thebabadook.com in the gallery section). What a great piece and maybe even more effective than the full length feature. You get the mother’s frustration, but you also get to see the love. In this context, I fully believe that the monster is a manifestation of the mother’s anger and that her yelling at it and sticking it back in the closet is her controlling that side of her. She still keeps it alive (by feeding it) - since kids are inherently annoying at times - but she keeps it under control. While “The Babadook” book is really creepy and cool, I think it kind of obscures the message in the movie.
We watched it tonight and for the most part liked it, other than it suffering from the horror movie trope of having too many endings.
What really bugged me was that the sound was all over the map. I was constantly adjusting the volume and missed probably half the dialogue. Was the theatrical version like that, or did we just get a bum disc?
Anyway, now I’m looking forward to the Cuban-produced remake - The Babaloo.
I’ll kick in my support for this movie. It was pretty cool.
The Babaloo
“A famous, Cuban bandleader feels his sanity slipping away as he deals with the antics of his hyperactive and needy wife. His misery is compounded by the sudden appearance of two spirits who constantly comment on his situation and enable even crazier escapades by his spouse.”
Awesome, thanks for the link!
I loved this and thought the sound work on it was very good, excepting one particular raptor scream that I swear I’ve heard a bunch but can’t place (like Wilhelm III or something). Also whatever they did to punch up Essie Davis (from the two shitty Matrix movies! couldn’t figure it out while watching and had to look it up, knew I had seen her somewhere) screams down the stretch was absolutely 100% terrifying. The clickity clack of the Babadook’s claws were close (but not exactly) in sound to the dog pawing around which I think was a nice touch (this did not occur to me until late in the movie).
The kid was something else. He was fucking exhausting but again that was the point. She was not dealing with her Husband’s death and it was spilling over into her kid, whom she was not in a right frame of mind to properly raise (she just hid it well enough). So of course he’s bouncing off the walls, occasionally obnoxious, occasionally rotten. He’s really good in some key scenes while still coming off as a believable 100% in no way adjusted kid. I feel like I need to take some tranquilizers after watching him, and I don’t even have kids. I award him the Dakota Fanning Award for Child Acting (too bad she never got to be in a movie this good at that age. Actually you know what I totally am glad I does not exist in movie form? Her in The Bad Seed).
I tend to favor Hepcat’s interpretation of events. Mr Babadook’s realness is ultimately irrelevant but on one level he’s a metaphor for all the problems the mom has. Also the scene on the news about the killed kid 100% featued Essie Davis creepily staring out the window, but I see that as her having sunk deep into the thrall of The Babadook/her depression, and not as her having actually killed her kid (that’s too bleak for me to ponder overmuch). I thought the movie was very well shot. The glimpses of the coat/hat she keeps seeing were really great at ratcheting things up.
Bruce Lee could beat up the Babadook or else I may never actually sleep again. Also, whoever created the image biosc1 posted can just go die already.
I was going to watch another horror movie tonight but (1) don’t want to chase that with something that isn’t as good and also (2) not in the cards right now. That really was an exhausting movie. I need to watch something happy.
It is, among other things, the ‘monsters activating’ sound from Doom and Doom 2.