The Babadook

Runs Fri., Dec. 5–Thurs., Dec. 11 at 
SIFF Film Center. (Also: Fri.-Sat. at SIFF Cinema Egyptian.) Not rated. 93 minutes.

How did this children’s book get into the house? Nobody seems to know. But no matter—it’s here now, and there’s no escaping it. Books are like that; you open them, and they become part of your life, for better or worse. This one—it shares its title with the movie we are watching—is called The Babadook, almost an anagram for “bad book,” and that’s the effect it has on Amelia (Essie Davis) and her 6-year-old son Sam (Noah Wiseman). They’re especially vulnerable to its dark magic. Among other issues, the death of Sam’s father some years earlier is very much in the background of the scary little tale that unfolds.

Amelia reads the book with her troubled and overimaginative boy, ignoring the timeworn horror-movie warning about chanting the name of the monster. The Babadook is dark-suited and creepy-fingered, and he wears a cape and a Victorian hat, like a creature from an earlier era of horror—suggesting that what’s scary never really goes out of style. After a great deal of slow-burning buildup, the Babadook becomes real, and mother and son must wage battle (but then they have been all along).

This is the debut feature of writer/director Jennifer Kent, who skillfully keeps us locked into the moment-by-moment thrills of a monster movie, but also insists that this Babadook is clearly a stand-in for the other problems that inflict the lonely household: grief, guilt, depression, an unwillingness to live life. And because Kent is Australian, there has to be an undercurrent of curious humor to this disquieting storyline—the world is already comically askew long before the Babadook makes his entrance.

The two leads are excellent, and the throwback pleasures of watching an old-fashioned approach to horror are very real. If this movie isn’t quite the masterpiece some have suggested, it still hits a lot of fascinating moments while generating an impressive number of chills up the spine. And it smartly gets to the root of so many great horror stories, which brings us back to the question of how the book got into the house: because, the movie suggests, mother and son wished it there. The Babadook may be a monster, but he’s the monster they needed.

film@seattleweekly.com