02 Aug The Babadook review (SPOILERS!)
I love good horror movies, but haven’t seen a good one in a long while… And The Babadook is totally awesome and fresh!
It is like psychological horror movie, there’s not THAT much scary and graphic images, but still it is very disturbing and has a ton of suspense.
Let me not describe it further and jump right into conclusions and what I think about it.
1. This a story of a single mother going crazy.
Sam (her child) feels that she can’t get over the death of a husband and may be even blames him subconsciously for it. May be that’s why Sam is so obsessed from the beginning of the movie and tries to show how he cares and can protect his mother. Children always feel what you really think and feel about them.
2. We see the book as the mother sees it.
All the movie is from the perspective of the mother. I want to assume that some things are happening only inside her head, and there’s NOTHING supernatural at all. Sure there was a book about Mr. Babadook at first, but after she destroyed it for the first time it existed only in her imagination, like those cockroaches.
3. There’s a very soft transition of sympathy in the movie from mother to a child.
At first we sympathize and can relate a lot to this poor single mother, but as the film goes Sam seems less and less crazy and more calm. And these drugs she force fed Sam, they were meant for her, not him.
4. In the 3/4 of the movie she realizes that she is crazy and needs professional help!
Right before or after killing a dog probably, and she says it out loud. But the scary thing is that at the end she really believes in Babadook and brings him worms. So in the end of it she is even more crazy than ever! And now she will not go to a psychiatrist to get help, she is trapped and can snap again any time.
5. You can’t get rid of the Babadook.
Yep, the same as with schizophrenia.
6. How scary it is to be a child!
And not because you believe in monsters. It’s because nobody believes you. And you can’t run away anywhere. And you don’t know that much about the world and you are weak. Hard to imagine something more helpless than a child hunted down by his mother.
There’re different theories and explanations about this movie. The most popular one is that the Babadook is like your Shadow self and you need to accept it. But I like to think that that’s a story of a schizophrenic mother, it is scarier this way and more real.