The 126th review!
Seven more days until vacation, and thank God it’s Zero Day, too much breaking news early this morning. So after naps and some errand running, Becca and I watched...
The Babadook (2014).
I first remember first hearing about this movie on one of the Deadspin blogs, the writer and everyone was falling over themselves to praise it. But those sites seem to have a bias against anything America and tend to overhype what comes from across the pond. With that said, it’s a good movie, and has some chilling scenes, but it’s not the end-all-be-all.
So a pregnant wife and her husband are driving to the hospital because she’s ready to pop, and all of a sudden a car crash kills the husband, but the wife lives and then she gives birth on the same day her husband dies. Fast forward six years and she’s still not over it and kind of resents her son. While reading to her son one night he pulls out a book titled Mr. Babadook, naturally it’s bad news. Eventually the Babadook from the movies comes out and cause some scary shenanigans. Including one scene where it makes changes to the book with some extremely disturbing new pages.
It has some frightening moments. You never get a good look at the creature, it’s always shrouded in shadow and its movements are creepy and off putting. With that said, with the way it was built up, I can’t help but a feel let down. The movie travels through at a slow pace, which is good and bad. It succeeds in really letting things develop and it’s impressive because pretty much the mother and her son are the only two characters in it. But it does seem to drag at parts.
If you check the IMDB board there’s some alternate theories that make the movie a lot more interesting, but I prefer seeing it straight forward, I like my monsters as monsters.
Now, Becca sees it differently, she thought it was one of the scariest movies she’s ever seen, and while it had its moments, I wanted more.
That, and they killed the dog, so fuck this movie.