Director: Jennifer Kent
Writer: Jennifer Kent
Cast: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman
Runtime: 93 mins.
2014
Welcome to the very special 50th post of Post-Credit Coda! Numbers are accidents, but it just so happens that we have a very special movie review to go along with the milestone. Earlier this month I wrote up It Follows, which is part of an exclusive new club of excellent high concept horror films that don't rely on cheap jump scares, retrogressive morality, and victims who aren't turning lights on for no reason. I would like to think this club was founded by The Cabin in the Woods, a metafictional horror masterpiece from a few years back that laid the smackdown on contemporary horror and all its infantile malarkey. Perhaps the club's only other member is our current topic of discussion: The Babadook. Even with only two or three movies in the club, folks are eager to herald these films as the sign of a high quality horror resurgence, the likes of which we haven't seen since Scream torpedoed the slasher genre, as I wrote about long long ago.
In many ways, It Follows and The Babadook are of a piece, but one major thing keeps them distinct in my experience. It Follows is easy. The Babadook is not.
After seeing It Follows with a friend, it was immediately clear that we had the exact same visceral, unsettling, enjoyable experience, for all the same reasons. The merits of that film are clear. But I've seen The Babadook with three different people at this point, and none of us had a remotely similar viewing experience. In fact, The Babadook has led to some of the more in-depth and difficult movie discussions I've ever had.
I say the movie is brilliant, beautiful, terrifying, feminist, singular, and thematically resonant. My friends say the movie is decent, too revelatory, a wee bit sexist, and unresolved. Who's right?
I'm right, of course.
There are three ways to misjudge a movie: 1. you're not ready to understand how good it is, 2. you're not ready to understand how bad it is, 3. you're not the kind of person to understand this movie. Forward, backward, and sideways. Let's ignore the third type for now, because that has to do with personality and genre and all sorts of indistinguishable factors. Focus on the first two, which both involve you watching a movie before you're ready to grasp its intricacies or wider resonances.
My example for the former is Taxi Driver. I watched that movie about seven years ago, and I still think about how underprepared I was to engage with it in any meaningful way. It's one of those movies that I did not like, but that I am absolutely sure would fascinate me if I watched it now. Sometimes those are the most important kinds of movies to force yourself to watch.
My example for the latter is Kingsman: The Secret Service. I enjoyed the hell out of that movie when I watched it a few months back, but I have no faith that I will hold it in high regard a decade from now. A better example is probably a movie called Split Infinity that I wrote about in post number one on this blog.
When you misjudge a movie because you've watched it to soon, the cure is always simply to watch more movies. The more films you have under your belt, and the more you've thought about the storytelling medium, the more tools you will have with which to engage the material. It's not that the movie was "too smart" for you or that you "weren't smart enough" to criticize it--it's just that you need to build up context and language for criticism before your brain starts to wrap around certain ways of presenting stories.
But since we can't watch five hundred more movies instantly, the other cure for misjudgment is just a healthy dose of self-awareness. If I had had more self-awareness, I would have understood that my strong urge to defend Spider-Man 3 was less due to any merits of the film, and more due to my intense desire for the film to be good. With self-awareness I can watch a film and feel that it is totally beyond me, but instead of participating in the comfortable American way of calling the unfamiliar stupid and bad, I can look forward to the day when I'm able to give the work the justice that I intuitively feel it deserves.
Why am I telling you all this? Frankly, I have no idea.
This has been one of the hardest blog posts I've ever written. I wanted badly to write about it after seeing it last year, but I couldn't find an angle to do justice to all my thoughts and feelings about the movie. It's been on my to-do list ever since then, and my actions have not caught up to my aspirations. I just couldn't get rid of it.
Maybe I'm going on about judging, misjudging, development, and self-awareness because I want to communicate with you how emphatically I believe The Babadook to be a complex and special horror movie that should be cherished and shared. Not only that, but I believe my judgment is sound. The problem is making that belief jive with the fact that at least three of my good friends, whose judgment I respect, were not nearly as gung-ho about the film as I am.
The whole matter has me so twisted up that I am now realizing this post is fourteen paragraphs in and I still haven't said anything about the actual movie. I think what I need to do is take some time to sing the film's praises with specificity, before returning to tortured abstractions.
The Babadook is a film about the gut-clenching terror of single motherhood. Amelia (Essie Davis) is raising her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) alone. Unfortunately, Samuel has serious behavior issues. Nobody wants to be around either of them as a result, and Amelia is feeling lonely and trapped in a thankless relationship with her child. This is only compounded when Samuel pulls a strange pop-up book from the bookshelf, one that tells of a malevolent force just waiting to come into your house, if you let it in...
From the first shot it is startlingly apparent that The Babadook is interested in far more complex matters than 99% of the other horror movies you could dig up. The cinematography is aching with palpable depression and yearning. The lighting is definitive. The production design is masterful, as exemplified by the eerie-in-its-physical-plausibility pop-up book. The sound design grates on your nerves. Even the editing thrilled me with its jarring yet completely intuitive cuts.
Even more exciting is the fact that this is a feature film that focuses exclusively on an unglamorous single mother and her child, and it gives both of these characters agency, depth, and thematic resonance. This is rare in the adult white man-dominated medium of film, and it's not for nothing that The Babadook is the passion project of a female writer-director, of which there are shamefully few on the scene.
Also it's scary as hell.
That, in a nutshell, is why I love The Babadook. Pretty simple, right? Any movie lover's gotta agree, right?
Not so, not so. My perspective was challenged by several in-depth conversations about the movie. Let me point out a few.
I thought the movie had an excellent and progressive portrayal of a woman, whereas my friend pointed out that the main character spends a good deal of time wishing she had a man in her life. I felt that this wish had far more to do with general loneliness and lack of intimacy, but my friend's point caught me off guard. I later told them that it had been written and directed by a woman, which in their mind changed their interpretation of the gender roles on display. This then opened up a whole can of worms about authorial intent, auteur theory, and all sorts of complicated interpretive shenanigans.
I thought the movie's abstracted portrayal of depression was bone-chilling, whereas my friend watched the movie far more literally than I did and therefore found the monster to be ultimately disappointing. I felt that he hadn't watched the movie on its own terms, and therefore disagreed with his interpretation, but the conversation led me to grapple with the multitude of levels of abstraction and representation that can be at play in the medium of film. What does it mean for a movie monster to be "literal" as opposed to "abstracted"? What tools can you use to measure such things? Is that picture onscreen a physical representation, a metaphor, both, or somewhere in between? In addition to all that, my friend's perspective (which I hadn't even considered during the film) opened up possibilities for me surrounding the inception of the pop-up book.
I thought the movie's ending, while not happy per se, offered a significant ray of hope, whereas my friend found the ending to be far more ambiguous and even sinister. I felt the ending contained evidence to support my claim, but my friend's ambiguity issued from their inability to ignore the massive trauma both characters had suffered over the course of the film. Suddenly, as happened in all three of these examples, I had a moment of uncertainty about the solid ground of my perspective--not enough to make me change my mind, but enough so that my interpretation was complicated and colored by those of my friends. This sort of interaction is why art happens, and why art needs to be discussed. This sort of interaction is why I made my blog's little slogan "A movie isn't finished when the credits roll." This sort of interaction forces you to grow into the kind of person who can appreciate more movies than you could before.
You know what, I still think I'm right even after all this talking and wrestling and talking some more. But if I had walked out of that movie not willing to hear dissenting perspectives, I wouldn't still be grappling with it today. My takeaway would have been more facile, and my satisfaction more temporary. I wouldn't have had such a fraught and important relationship with this film.
So, thank you to everyone who challenged my viewing of The Babadook, and to everyone who has respectfully challenged my viewing of any movie. So long as both parties in a conversation are willing to critically listen to each other, progress can happen. No, it must happen.
4.5 / 5 BLOBS
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