Don’t miss this new Australian thriller The Babadook (M)!

Our film society series brings a wide range of different films to the James and the The Babadook is just that: something different.  Screening on Sunday, 17 May at 7pm only, it features a storybook demon which terrorises an ungovernable child and his mother (Essie Davis) in Jennifer Kent’s gripping and brilliantly idiosyncratic frightener.

“What starts off as a seemingly standard evil-child outing gradually transforms into something else entirely. By the end, the supremely grating and peculiar seven-year-old Samuel is the most sympathetic thing in the film. The Babadook is a bogeyman-like figure pictured in a super-creepy handmade children’s pop-up book that mysteriously appears and cannot be disposed of no matter how hard Samuel’s mother tries… The Babadook features a number of genuinely unsettling scenes, (embarrassing disclosure: I checked the closets and under the bed before I tried to sleep that night), but it also packs an emotional punch. That’s mostly due to Davis’ truly shape-shifting performance… ‘Baba dook dook dook!’ should take its place in the annals of horror history alongside ‘Candyman’ and ‘Bloody Mary’ as words too terrifying to repeat but too tempting not to.” — Laura Kern, Film Comment

“You may not believe in bogeymen, but you better believe The Babadook is the best Australian film in years.” — Simon Miraudo, Quickflix