The Babadook

The most frightening thing in The Babadook is Amelia's face when Samuel will not stop talking. Kent's film is about a woman who has not slept properly in six years, whose son is exhausting in ways nobody around her will acknowledge, and whose husband died driving her to the hospital to give birth to him. The monster is almost a technicality.

Essie Davis's performance is the reason it works, and it is a harder performance than it looks. She has to be sympathetic while doing things that are not — snapping at a child, lying to a social worker, saying the unforgivable thing out loud — and she has to make the audience complicit in finding Samuel unbearable before the film turns and asks what that cost him. Noah Wiseman is extraordinary and was reportedly protected from the worst of the material during filming, which was the correct call.

The design is a deliberate refusal

The Babadook itself is a pop-up book figure, a coat and a hat and a silent film gesture, shot in flickers and at the edge of frame. Kent has said she borrowed from Méliès and Lon Chaney, and the creature is barely in the film — maybe ninety seconds of visible screen time. Everything else is sound: the clicking, the voice, the knocking in threes.

That choice is why the film has aged better than almost anything from the same wave. There is no CGI to date and no monster reveal to be disappointed by.

Where it is weaker than its reputation

The middle act repeats itself. There are three or four separate sequences of Amelia being unable to sleep while something moves in the house, and the film does not escalate much between them. And the social-realist half and the fairy-tale half never fully fuse — the police station and the social worker belong to a different register than the pop-up book, which some viewers find clumsy rather than disorienting.

But the ending is one of the best in modern horror, and it is the thing almost nobody expects. For the same grief-as-monster logic handled bleaker, Hereditary; for the same mother-and-son isolation, Lake Mungo is the gentler, sadder cousin.

The short answer: the Babadook is not destroyed. Amelia confronts it, refuses it the house and her son, and forces it into the cellar. The film ends with her and Samuel living normally in the same house, and Amelia going down to the basement with a bowl of worms to feed it. It is still there. It will always be there. It is manageable now.

Why isn't the Babadook killed?

Because the film is about grief, and grief is not killed. The book's own rule — you can't get rid of the Babadook — is stated early and the ending honours it literally. A version where Amelia destroys it would be a film arguing that bereavement can be finished, which Kent plainly does not believe.

What does the basement mean?

The cellar is where Oskar's things are, and the film establishes it as the room Amelia will not enter. Putting the creature there is explicit: the thing she could not look at is now in the place where her husband's belongings are, contained, visited deliberately, on a schedule.

What is she feeding it?

Worms, dug from the garden, which Samuel helps gather. The detail matters more than it looks. The feeding is a chore the family does together, calmly, as part of a normal day. That is the film's whole argument about living with loss, and it is delivered as gardening.

Is the Babadook real or is Amelia having a breakdown?

The film supports both and commits to neither, and unusually it does not need to choose. Everything the creature does could be Amelia — the dog, the glass, the voice — and the film is careful to give her the agency for all of it. But Samuel sees it too, and Samuel believed in it first.

The strongest reading is that the distinction is not the point. Whether the thing in the house is a monster or a mother's untreated grief, the solution is identical: name it, stop pretending it is not there, and feed it in the basement.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Tone 014 is the signature. 30 works score lower, which puts it among the bleaker things in the index — but note that it is one of very few films at this level with something like a hopeful ending. The bleakness is in the middle, not the end.

Viscera 026 is low — only 27 works score lower. There is one hard act of violence involving an animal and one brief injury. Almost nothing else. The film's difficulty is emotional.

Pace 030 is dread — 42 works are slower. The horror accumulates through sleeplessness rather than incident.

Era bias 080 is modern craft, with 72 works lower. Clean digital photography, a contemporary sound design, and the creature's silent-film styling sitting inside it as a deliberate anachronism.

Threat 040 leans supernatural, though the film's most frightening scenes contain nothing supernatural at all.

On jump scares: a handful, and the sound design does more than any of them. The knocking is the thing people remember.