The horror films made by Australians are indeed quite different from those produced by Hollywood, although this film inevitably uses a lot of genre film routines in the second half. As a director's debut, Jennifer Kent is indeed extraordinary, and the characters are accurately portrayed. The contradictory and complex relationship between the little boy and his mother is slowly revealed in this metaphorical text. The setting of the monster has a retro expressionist color. The important thing is that it is not a superficial villain in Hollywood that is specially used to scare the audience, but the embodiment of the repressed emotions in the mother's heart. She couldn't face her husband's accidental death, so she could only vent on her son, and was eventually influenced by her son's pure love to break her inner demon. It is more difficult to say goodbye to the sad past than to say that the mother fought the monster to the death. There are many novelties about the use of horror genre films to express depression. The director uses a lot of unconventional composition and editing techniques, as well as the sound to build a sense of separation between the mother's self-imposed confinement and the surrounding environment, inadvertently. Create a spooky and eerie atmosphere. This is completely different from the common surprise in Hollywood. The point is not to create sensory stimulation, and even the handling of the final ending is a bit unexpected. The monsters are not destroyed, but raised like pets. It can be seen that the director has carefully grasped and innovatively transformed traditional genre films. If it is not for commercial reasons to quote genre elements, this debut work can still play a sharper and purer author's edge.
View more about The Babadook reviews
