8 / 10
Official trailer
The Babadook is Jennifer Kent’s 2014 Australian psychological horror film depicting a widowed mother and her troubled young son who become haunted by a malevolent presence after reading a sinister pop-up children’s book.
Essie Davis plays Amelia Vanek. Noah Wiseman plays Samuel Vanek. Daniel Henshall plays Robbie. Hayley McElhinney plays Claire. Jennifer Kent wrote the screenplay.
Causeway Films and Smoking Gun Productions produced the film on a budget of approximately two million dollars, and it grossed approximately ten million worldwide, generating exceptional return on investment through later streaming distribution. This launched Kent’s directorial career and the source character has later gathered cultural visibility.
Essie Davis frightened me more than the monster did. She plays Amelia’s grief and exhaustion so convincingly that I spent much of the film dreading what the mother might do. I think it’s the smartest horror film about grief I know, with one reservation about how hard it leans on its difficult child.
Jennifer Kent’s film stands among those that showed how psychological horror could run through grief structure that allows supernatural content to feel like psychological metaphor. The film makes the case that a horror film can build through ambiguous construction that maintains both supernatural and psychological readings throughout. Amelia acts as a character whose gathered grief and exhaustion drive this film’s psychological intensity.
Jennifer Kent’s direction keeps formal precision that allows the content to work through accumulating dread instead of explicit content. The production set the template that later contemporary horror productions extended.
The Grief Structure
Amelia’s continuing pain over her husband’s death seven years before the picture’s opening gives the story its grief structure. This handling works through building detail that the source develops carefully. The film generates psychological foundation that the supernatural content frames.
Samuel’s difficulty builds alongside Amelia’s grief, and the film treats the two as one problem. This is also where the film tests my patience.
Samuel is exhausting in the first half, and I think Kent pushes his behavior a notch past what I needed to feel Amelia’s desperation. That’s my reservation, and it’s the main reason this is an 8.
For Writers
Horror with psychological foundation requires integrating emotional material with supernatural content instead of treating them as separate. See how Kent develops Amelia’s grief alongside Samuel’s difficulty.
The Ambiguity Approach
An ambiguous approach maintains both supernatural and psychological readings throughout the picture. The treatment uses deliberate construction that doesn’t resolve into single interpretation. It generates gathered tension that conventional supernatural confirmation wouldn’t produce.
The famous final sequence, where Amelia keeps the Babadook in the basement and feeds it worms, allows both readings, and I think it’s the best ending in modern horror. It treats grief as something you feed and live beside, a thing that stays in the house. That ending moved me more than any jump scare could have, and it’s the scene that lifts the film to an 8.
For Writers
Horror ambiguity can sustain throughout instead of resolving into single interpretation. Look at how Kent maintains both supernatural and psychological readings in the final sequence.
The Production Design
Alex Holmes’s production design builds the film’s look and makes the Vanek house a psychological space. The palette is limited and the rooms feel sealed off from the world, and I found that house as oppressive as anything in the story. I think it does more to scare me than the creature itself.
The design of the book itself reads as production element that the source foregrounds. This approach combines pop-up book aesthetic with disturbing illustration that the production’s resources accommodated. This makes clear how production design can encode horror through specific object.
For Writers
Production design in horror can encode psychological state through environment and particular objects. Pay attention to how Holmes’s design tones the Vanek house as psychological space.
Craft Note
The film shows that psychological horror unfolds through grief structure combined with ambiguous supernatural construction. The production’s exceptional return on investment and growing reputation confirmed its status. The deliberate pacing and ambiguous resolution polarized some viewers who expected supernatural confirmation, though the production rewards engaged viewing through its psychological weight.
Is The Babadook worth watching?
I give The Babadook an 8. Essie Davis gives a ferocious, frightening performance, Kent keeps both readings alive to the last scene, and the basement ending is the reason I’d put it near the top of modern horror. What keeps it from a 9 is Samuel in the first half, pushed so hard that I spent energy on irritation I’d have liked to spend on dread. See it, and don’t expect it to explain itself.
