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The Babadook (2014)
Worthwhile but frustrating
I still don't quite know how to feel about "The Babadook". The trailer left me more excited than I've been for any horror film in years. However, I should know by now that horror trailers often misrepresent the movie. "The Babadook" has horror/thriller elements, but it's definitely not the monster movie you might expect. The closest comparison would be Aronofsky's "Black Swan" - both are slow, increasingly surreal portraits of a woman's descent into madness. However, by the end of "The Babadook" I was wondering if even that was the correct explanation. This movie left me with questions, and not in a good way.
The plot concerns a woman struggling to raise her troublesome son while doing her best to stifle her grief for his father. The fact that he died while driving her to the hospital to give birth plants the seeds of resentment that drive the plot. It's an uncomfortable subject matter, and one that provides the real "horror" of the story - that a mother could have such dark feelings towards her own child. We see her try to push them down and be the best mother she can, and over the course of the movie the effort starts to crack her.
Unfortunately, this solid premise is muddled by the introduction of a very ambiguous monster - the titular Babadook. The evil (and reappearing) pop-up book that introduces the creature is fantastically creepy, however the payoff to all that foreboding is little more than a few cursory (and sometimes very cheap) scares. It all comes together in a mystifying muddle of an ending. From the moment the Babadook was introduced, I never doubted for a minute that it could simply be a product of the mother's fevered mind. However, the ending gives us frustratingly little closure. If it was all in her mind, it means she hallucinated half the movie. If it was real, we are never given confirmation. I began to wonder if the entire movie was simply meant to be taken metaphorically. Some viewers may be OK with this conclusion, I was not.
Of course, there is still a great deal to praise. Essie Davis' performance as the mother is genuinely incredible - award-worthy, even. Watching her start out so frazzled and quiet only to be (literally) roaring by the end was a real treat. The son, too, is surely one of the best child actors I've ever seen. The atmosphere throughout is off-kilter and consistently unnerving (again, quite "Black Swan"-esque) with some particularly good sequences where we see the monster's face, again and again, in old TV programs and movies. Ultimately "The Babadook" is a film experience worth having, but one that left me a little unsatisfied.
It Follows (2014)
Perfect? No. Daring and creepy? Yes.
This is one of those movies that's generated so many polarized opinions that it's hard to sift through them all. If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor: stop scrolling through reviews right now and go watch it. "It Follows" isn't perfect, and some people might find it genuinely ridiculous, but it's original enough to deserve being viewed with fresh eyes and an open mind.
What hooked me was the essentially nightmarish quality of the premise: an inexplicable "thing" following you, relentlessly, no matter what. You can run, as they say, but you can't hide. "It" often takes forms that are (seemingly) non-threatening yet incongruous: a hospital-gowned old woman in a school hallway, for instance. By its very premise, this movie builds an atmosphere of dread that I've never felt before. The first time a character makes note of a "person" that he quickly discovers no one else can see was almost unbearably tense.
However, the monster in "It Follows" does fall into the trap that all such heavily rule-based creatures fall into: you'll spend most of the movie thinking of creative ways to beat it. This is especially so in the second half, where all the characters are trying to plan out exactly that. It also starts getting weighed down a bit by the sexual drama, some of which is a little groan-worthy (case in point: the boy who seems completely willing to inherit a death curse if it means he can sleep with his friend). These two negatives might be enough to kill the experience for some - I thought the acting (especially from lead Maika Monroe) was good enough to pull me through when another movie might have lost me completely.
"It Follows" seems to be a love/hate it kind of movie, and one you'll really need to form your own opinions on. I won't extol it as "the best thing to happen to horror in years", but it's a nicely constructed and brave little film worth seeing - if only to find out what everyone's talking about!
We Are Still Here (2015)
We Are Still Here...but why are you?
To be honest, this movie baffled me. Is it absolutely terrible? No. Did it have potential? Yes. But somehow all of it amounted to only this bizarre mess of a film. Let me put something out there first: "We Are Still Here" clocks in at one hour and 17 minutes. At the end I expected there to be 20 more minutes of movie left. The whole thing felt rushed, and the ending was...abrupt, to say the least.
The story follows a couple who move into a new house hoping to move past the death of their son. This is a time-tested plot. However, "We Are Still Here" proceeds to give us almost no information about the son and no time to feel the weight of his parent's grief. It merely establishes that his mother can "feel his presence" in the house before embarking on a series of cheap scares. There are several very sudden character deaths that in a better movie would seem bold. Here they just seem lazy. There is precisely one very creepy moment that would have been perfect if it hadn't immediately transitioned to a series of jump scares (that it was also intercut with Lisa Marie's "acting" didn't help).
The later scenes involve almost cartoonish amounts of gore. If the movie was an intentional horror-comedy this would have been fine. The first 3/4 of the movie seemed to be going for straight horror, though, so I didn't know what to make of it. I could talk about the bad writing and jarringly terrible lighting as well, but what would be the point? It ultimately felt like a short film stretched beyond its limit. The concept would have worked great in a tight 15-20 minutes, where movies can get away with the spareness and ambiguity that "We Are Still Here" features. As it is, though, it feels like a movie that ran out of budget and ideas long before it was truly finished.