Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: FINALLY got around to watching The Babadook (spoilers)

[quote name="Fullofkittens"]I really was under the impression that this was something else. People were telling me that "oh it's so good because it's so ambiguous, you don't know if it's supernatural or psychological!!! VERY SCARY!" and I thought it was going to be...ambiguous about whether it's supernatural. It isn't?????? This is a decently scary movie where you spend an hour very worried that a mother may go crazy and murder her son. Then at the end it...kinda breaks the 4th wall and basically prints in giant text on your screen <b>THE BABADOOK IS A METAPHOR.</b> All ambiguity is 100% resolved at the end. Ordinarily I would expect something like this to <i>symbolically connect</i> the horrific events to the person's psychological state to strengthen the theme, but then the scene in the bedroom at the end is like, nope, it's not symbolism, it is just a literary metaphor: A widow is overcome with grief and resentment and almost kills her kid, which is represented visually by a boogieman thing. There's some physical stuff that's not explainable (invisible forces throwing the kid around, the lead actress puking up black shit when she finally snaps out of it) but all that too is just supposed to be, like, a fantasy representation of her grief and resentment. Then at the end, she's keeping it in the basement. Metaphorically. And her kid asks if he can see it and she says he can when he's older, which is just a metaphor for her saying to her kid she doesn't want to talk about how she feels lonely and sad and resentful, but that she will some day, and for now she has it under control. <i>All this seems very straightforward to me</i>. Did I miss something? Anyways, Essie Davis delivers a <b>great</b> performance which carries the movie. I think the comparison to <i>The Shining</i> is a very good one, I think going forward that's how I'll describe it to people. It's obviously not as good as <i>The Shining</i> but for a 2 million dollar film in 2015 they did a pretty good job.[/quote]