Tony (tectactoe)’s review published on Letterboxd:
[44]
Well made and shot well—a solid argument can even be made that it’s acted well. Lots of people seem to take issue with the boy being excessively nerve-grating but, uh, that’s kind of the fucking point. His flagrant performance jettisons us into the mindset of his manic-depressive mother who’s falling apart at the seams. At first you think, “How could a mother ever grow to hate her own son?” and then, well, you hear the fucker talk. At some point, I remember feeling bad for the boy also, because his mother was also losing her goddamn mind : it was a vicious feedback loop and the film did a really good job of putting the audience right in the hotbed of their cyclic torment. Where it misses big-time is in how glaringly obvious the "subtext" is, to the point where it's hardly even "sub" by any measure. Did anybody see this and not immediately realize it was an overt metaphor for living with depression and learning to cope? In theory, I have no problem with this, but when transposing mental illnesses into a manuscript for a horror flick, subtlety is the key to making it work. It should be a horror movie first and foremost with an underpinned assimilation of the mental illness. I want to have to think about it and interpret it for myself. THE BABADOOK is inelegant and ham-fisted, ending up way too uncomfortably forceful with its Big Message. It doesn’t play like a horror movie. It play like a movie about crippling depression that’s trying so hard to be a horror movie. Give the audience something to figure out for themselves.