Quote:
Originally Posted by Buboven  Indeed, as someone who has suffered and still to a degree still does suffer social anxiety, It talked to me in quite a personal way, to a certain extent, though for say woman who suffer from pre-natal depression it would I imagine be more relevant.
I think this film would make an excellent companion piece to We Need To Talk About Kevin for exploring such issues, another film I personally think is also very impressive, who else agrees? |
We Need to Talk about Kevin is definitely one of its cinematic precursors, as I think I said earlier in this thread, as is Dark Water and The Shining.
This is part of an article from the Guardian:
While there are plenty of jumps and scares in The Babadook, where the film really excels is in its detailing of the slow psychological shattering of its central character. The demons are not in the child, it turns out, but in the parent. And as we watch Amelia’s inexorable decline, it brings to mind another psychological horror: The Shining. Kent’s film doesn’t share all the qualities of Stanley Kubrick’s classic. There are no frame-gobbling images, no torrents of blood flowing down the streets of suburban Australia. But, as with Jack Nicholson’s stymied writer, you both want to sympathise with and cower from the increasingly crazed Amelia.
“I feel very honoured,” says Kent when I bring up the comparison (it’s clear I’m not the first). “But it’s funny because after Sundance I read The Shining and I feel that The Babadook is actually closer to the book than the Kubrick film. I guess that with the book Stephen King goes into the psychology of the character and you feel for him even when he’s going right on a downward spiral.”
That the downward spiral is undertaken by a woman is another thing that marks The Babadook as being different. In most mainstream horror, women are either blonde fodder for rampant serial killers or the petrified victims of supernatural creatures. They might also get to swing an axe or two (in a halter-neck top), but rarely are viewers invited inside their minds. Amelia is a woman unable to move beyond the grief of losing her husband. She is also struggling with her relationship with her only child. She tries to be tender towards him but ends up shocked, even intimidated. In picking at the maternal bond, Kent is dealing with one of society’s last taboos.