Emerging as a force to be reckoned with with her first two feature films, Antipodean filmmaker Jennifer Kent is such a top-line storyteller and sophisticated aesthete that every cinephile should put her on the esteemed pedestal as, perhaps, the next Jane Campion (if we lack a more germane comparison).
THE BADADOOK is a small-scale, low-budget horror feat, economically ekes out the hair-raising imagery of its titular creature (you never catch its entirety but it haunts from the ground up), but smartly uses it as a surrogate of one's inescapable grief. Amelia Vanek (Davis) is a single mother, whose husband Oscar (Winspear) died in a car accident when driving her to deliver their baby, six years later, the behavior of her son Samuel (Wiseman) becomes increasingly erratic after being startled by a pop-up book called Mr. Babadook, he has been always imagining some monster presence at home, but this time, Mr. Babadook's menacing influence starts to get the better of a jaded and distraught Amelia, who begins to lose her marbles and even goes filicidal just as the book portends.
A bedtime story turns into a dreadful incubus, Kent is so effective in keeping her no-frills narrative squarely gripping from A to Z, all the familiar haunted house tropes are engineered in such a minimalistic yet eloquent fashion (foley effect included) that not for once, she deigns to deploy cheap jump-scares to be deliberately spooky, all the tension, suspense and thrill, is emanated from the organically and quaintly orchestrated gravitas that also requests Herculean effort from the mother-son dyad.
A dewy-eyed tyke shifting between an obstreperous brat to a spunky guardian, Noah Wiseman is a revelation as a child actor, the verisimilitude of a bedeviled kid he embodies almost elicits our worry that the dark material might mar his own childhood innocence (which Kent conscientiously ascertains his playacting is seamlessly edited together without revealing too much plot details). However, the real deal is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, Essie Davis, who transmutes from a soft-spoken, caring mother to a somnambulistic, demonic monster with such strenuous exertion and commitment, that she can knock flat dead any number of unprepared viewers, and more than anything, Kent's compassionate, sage message of coming to terms with one's own inner demon with plenary sobriety and frankness hits the bull's-eye with distinction.
referential entries: Andrés Muschietti's MAMA (2013, 5.7/10).
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