"Movie critics spend a lot of time bitching about huge, special-effects-heavy spectacles that showcase the latest technological advances in filmmaking without engaging the viewers’ brains and hearts. The complaint itself has become a cliché, but most critics would probably be happy to have fewer occasions to rely on it. In terms of the resources the director had at hand and what she was able to make out of them, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is the anti-Jupiter Ascending. Kent’s little, low-budget horror movie is actually about something, and it carries a wallop that leaves your nerves and imagination shaken for days afterward.
"It’s a misuse of one talented filmmaker to use her achievement as a cudgel on another, but it’s a comparison worth stating: the Wachowskis, who have made good movies in the past and may do so again, created the shell of a richly layered fantasy world and made it move onscreen, but they failed in the deceptively simple-looking task of making the audience care about the fate of an endangered young woman and her love for a dashing hunk. Kent, working with whatevermoney and materials she could get her hands on over the course of years of planning, draws viewers into the sympathetically imagined mindset of a woman slipping into madness, whose terror is that she knows she’s capable of killing her child.
"Kent set a daunting task for herself by putting a potential Susan Smith at the center of her movie, and she used everything she had to get to the bulls-eye: the editing, camerawork, music, and performances (including the child-actor performance of the year) all work together to create a total experience that belies the fact that, for much of the film, all you have to watch are two people trapped inside a house together. And Kent made it at the right time in her development: if you look at Monster, the 2005 short film that served as the blueprint for the feature, you can see how far she’d come before embarking on her debut feature. The DIY spirit lives." ~ Philip Dyess-Nugent
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