The Babadook (2014) is the film that turned grief into a monster you can't unsee. Jennifer Kent's debut feature arrived with almost no Hollywood backing, shot in Adelaide for around two million Australian dollars, and landed at Sundance like a bomb nobody expected. Critics scrambled for the right word. Terrifying was accurate but not quite enough. Devastating was closer to it.
What the film is actually about
On the surface, The Babadook is about Amelia (Essie Davis), a widowed nurse raising her hyperactive seven-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) alone. Samuel is terrified of monsters. Then a children's pop-up book called "Mister Babadook" appears on the shelf, and things deteriorate fast. The creature in the book begins to manifest in the house. Or does it? Kent never fully resolves that question, and the ambiguity is the point.
Beneath the creature-feature scaffolding, the film is about what happens when grief goes unprocessed for years. Amelia's husband Oskar died in a car accident on the way to the hospital the night Samuel was born. She can't separate the joy of her son from the wound of her loss. Samuel's birthday isn't a celebration. It's a yearly reminder of the worst night of her life. Kent puts that detail in early and lets it echo through every scene.
Essie Davis carries the weight
Essie Davis gives one of the finest performances in modern horror. Full stop. The role asks her to be sympathetic and terrifying in almost equal measure, sometimes within the same shot. The film doesn't let Amelia be simply a victim. She's exhausted, resentful, occasionally cruel. She makes decisions that are hard to watch. Davis plays all of it without self-protection.
Noah Wiseman as Samuel is genuinely startling. Child performances in horror often tip into either cuteness or obvious directorial manipulation. Wiseman does neither. Samuel is a difficult kid. He's loud and obsessive and his behaviour at school is frankly alarming. Kent doesn't soften him to make Amelia more sympathetic. That's a brave choice. It makes the film's eventual emotional turn land with far more force.
The creature design and what it means
The Babadook itself is a triumph of restraint. Kent drew on German Expressionist imagery: the elongated fingers, the brim of the hat, the stark black-and-white palette of the pop-up book. The design owes a visible debt to the silhouette tradition that runs back through horror cinema to Nosferatu (1922), the original creature made entirely of shadow. Kent updates that visual language for a contemporary domestic space, and it works because the monster always feels like it belongs to Amelia's psychology rather than to the external world.
What Kent does brilliantly is keep the Babadook just out of full view for most of the runtime. You catch it in mirrors. You hear it in the walls. When it does appear clearly, you've already built a version of it in your own head. The film respects that. It doesn't override your imagination with spectacle.
The domestic setting as horror space
Kent shoots Amelia's house as a place slowly turning against its occupant. The colour palette bleaches out as the film progresses: early scenes carry warm, if exhausted, household tones; by the third act the house is almost monochrome. Production designer Karen Ward did exceptional work here, and cinematographer Radoslaw Ladczuk frames the interior spaces with a compression that feels claustrophobic without ever feeling like a stylistic trick.
The film sits comfortably alongside other grief-driven horrors like Hereditary (2018), which uses a family home as the container for trauma that keeps expanding past the walls. Both films understand that domestic space isn't neutral: it holds what happened there.
Where it earns its reputation
The Babadook is not a jump-scare film. There are maybe two moments in the whole runtime that qualify, and both earn their place by arriving after long stretches of dread rather than cheap setup. The horror here is cumulative. It's the sound of something in the ceiling. It's the book returning after it's been destroyed. It's Amelia's face in the kitchen at 3am, watching something that isn't quite her son.
The final act divides viewers, and that's fine. Kent refuses the genre's default ending. The Babadook doesn't get defeated. It gets put in the basement, fed periodically, and lived with. That's not a horror ending. It's a recovery ending. The monster is still there, under the house. It just isn't running the place anymore.
Verdict
The Babadook (2014) is a rare film that earns both its scares and its tears. Jennifer Kent's direction is precise and unsentimental. Davis's performance is among the best in the genre. The creature is iconic. The emotional architecture is sound enough to hold a second, third, and fourth viewing, each time revealing something that wasn't visible before. It belongs in any serious conversation about the films that prove horror can carry real psychological weight. Kent made one of the best horror films of the 2010s on almost nothing. It still hasn't been topped.
- Director: Jennifer Kent
- Cast: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall
- Runtime: 93 minutes
- Country: Australia
- Rating: 5 / 5