Troy du Plooy

The movie is good. The metaphor conveyed by the Babadook about grief is powerful and effectively conveyed. As a result, the message of the film is powerful, literally encouraging you to face your demons. The only place I feel it falls short is in the department of being scary. While the movie successfully managed to avoid falling into many horror clichès and also avoided over-playing the scariness of the supernatural Babadook, it failed to be truly scary. To a certain extent, the film didn't play up the scariness of the Babadook as an entity enough. While it could be argued that it would detract from the meaning of the film, it could also actually emphasise the power trauma can have and how terrifying it can be to face it. Relating to this, I feel that the way the build-up was executed didn't cause enough dread to develop. It's sort of like the Babadook does some spooky stuff and then *whoosh*... the mother gets possessed. I think that if they just made her descent into "madness" more gradual then the film would have become more memorable - this would also allow for the character development to be even more fleshed out. Despite my feeling that the film wasn't "scary" enough, I still really appreciate the metaphor conveyed by the movie. I just feel it didn't flesh out everything as well as it could have, also including the mother's relationship with the guy at her work - this could have showed even further positive development in the mother in the denouement of the story. Perhaps this movie lacked the budget to do all the aforementioned fleshing out, but what it does do, it does well. My rating: 76%