The Babadook · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A children's book you don't remember buying is sitting on the shelf. Red cloth cover, hand-stitched, no author. Your son hands it to you because he wants a bedtime story, and you open it because that is what mothers do, and the pop-up illustrations are stark black-and-white and the figure inside has a top hat and long fingers and the rhyme promises that once you let it in, you can never be rid of it. You keep reading. That is the whole engine of Jennifer Kent's film: not a monster that arrives, but a thing that is read aloud, that asks to be deciphered, and that gets worse the more you understand it.

Deleuze has a name for an image that has stopped explaining itself and started demanding interpretation: the lectosign, the readable image. In ordinary cinema you see a door and you expect someone to come through it; the image tells you what to do with it. Kent jams that reflex. The book, with its archaic Victorian silhouette, isn't a clue that advances a plot — it's a surface the film keeps shoving back at us to read, and every reading turns out to be about Amelia rather than about a creature. The Babadook is a word and a look before it is ever a body. When the book says you can't get rid of it once you've seen it, it is describing how images work in this film. Once read, they stay.

What makes the reading unbearable is that two readings stay at once. For most of its length the film can be told as a haunting or as a widow's breakdown, and Simon Njoo's editing refuses, deliberately, to cut in any way that would settle it. Deleuze calls this the powers of the false — not lying, but making true-or-false undecidable on purpose, as a creative principle rather than a flaw. Classical cinema ran on a contract: the camera shows you what happened. Kent voids that contract. The supernatural account and the psychiatric account are presented as co-true, mutually exclusive, both fully furnished. This is falsifying narration, and horror is its natural home, because dread lives exactly in not knowing whether the thing in the hallway is real.

Hold the two readings side by side and you get what Deleuze means by a crystal-image: present and hallucination grown so tightly together you can no longer prise them apart, like an object and its reflection in a dark window. The house supplies the crystal. Radek Ladczuk shoots the two-storey home as a cold blue-grey box, light-starved, symmetrical, Amelia framed inside doorways and windows until the architecture itself seems to close on her. This is what Deleuze would call an any-space-whatever — a space that has quit being a mere setting for action and become a pure carrier of mood, deserted and affective, all negative space and the dread of what the frame leaves out. The décor stops being where she lives and becomes what she feels.

And it has a basement. The dead husband's belongings are stored down there, behind a door, beneath the domestic floor — and Deleuze's vocabulary for that arrangement is almost too exact. He distinguishes the derived milieu, the ordinary social surface, from the originary world that erupts underneath it: a place of raw drives, appetite, degradation, sliding toward exhaustion and death. The grief Amelia cannot metabolize, the resentment she cannot say — that she might be better off without her son — these are not feelings she acts on. They are an impulse, a slope, and the Babadook is their symptom: the hidden drive given a top hat. When she finally turns and menaces Samuel, the film has simply let the originary world come up the basement stairs.

Through all of this Amelia is not an agent who fixes her situation. She is a seer — Deleuze's voyant — someone who can only watch and endure what she perceives, with no clean action available to discharge it. The film is built from duration: shots held past comfort, near-silence broken by Jed Kurzel's drones and that rasped ba-ba-DOOK, the everyday of tantrums and sleeplessness stretched until it curdles. This is horror reorganized around enduring rather than escaping.

Kent earns this by inheritance, and she's open about the debts. The buckling, predatory apartment of Polanski's Repulsion and the unresolved motherhood-dread of Rosemary's Baby are her direct templates; the imploding family home and a parent stalking a child across thresholds come from The Shining; the creature is a climbing shadow lifted from Murnau's Nosferatu, set against warped, painted geometry straight out of Caligari, and animated with the handmade pop-up trickery of Méliès rather than CGI. She gathers a century of Expressionist craft and points it at a kitchen table.

Then comes the move that matters most. Amelia does not destroy the Babadook. She subdues it and keeps it, fed and contained, in the basement — visited, never vanquished. Deleuze would call that a cracked crystal: a fissure in the closed world, a line of flight that leads out without erasing what it leads from. Horror promised exorcism; Kent delivers cohabitation. You don't kill grief. You live above it and bring it food. That refusal of catharsis is the film's real invention, and it is why the genre kept borrowing from her.