Review: The Babadook

City Paper grade: A-

There is no fear like a child’s, and though the protagonist of Jennifer Kent’s astonishing first feature is a grown woman, the monster that invades her house through the mind of her 5-year-old son brings with it the kind of terror that can’t be banished with logic or a splash of holy water. The Babadook — a name that only sounds silly until you’ve heard it croaked in a voice like the cracking of a tomb — first comes to Amelia (Essie Davis) and Sam (Noah Wiseman) in the pages of a children’s book whose illustrations combine the Victorian dread of Edward Gorey with the jagged edges of a crude charcoal smear.

At first, the boy’s insistence that the creature is real, and inside their house, is just one more thing pushing his mother toward the brink of mental collapse: She’s been widowed since his birth — the boy’s father died driving her to the maternity ward — and his insistence on bringing homemade anti-monster weapons to school constantly lands him in trouble, to the point where even a mild whine makes her apoplectic. But the Babadook starts to make his way into her mind as well, embodying her grief over her husband’s death, and her irrational, unexpressable anger at her son for causing it. We become terrified for Amelia, and of her. Kent, who quotes Maria Bava and George Méliès alongside Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, goes back to cinema’s earliest monsters, using jerky stop-motion rather than slick CGI; as the Babadook moves towards Amelia at 12 frames a second, your mind fills in the gaps with the stuff of nightmares.

Davis’ performance, with its shades of Catherine Deneuve in Polanski’s Repulsion, is a tour de force, and Wiseman captures both the innocence and aggravation of a child’s attachment to imaginary worlds. But good as both are, the real star is Kent, who made a masterpiece her first time out.