The Babadook, directed by Jennifer Kent
(not rated, 93 minutes)
Genuinely unsettling, Australian director Jennifer Kent’s first feature, The Babadook, is an elegant horror film that viewers may find hard to forget. It features a little broken family headed by nursing-home caregiver Amelia (Essie Davis), a struggling single mother whose husband was killed in a car wreck while on the way to the hospital to witness the birth of their son Sam (Noah Wiseman). Now 6 years old, Sam is a terror at school and is obsessed with building elaborate weapons to protect himself and his mother from a monster that haunts his dreams.
Once Sam gives the monster a palpable shape and name — the Babadook — he’s all the more real to him. And soon Amelia suspects that her son is actually manufacturing evidence of its existence. But the Babadook has gotten into her head as well. And while the movie is ambiguous on the question of whether the monster is an actual supernatural being or the product of mental illness, there’s never any doubt that the danger is real.
Set primarily in a creaky old house, the film is populated with traditional horror figures such as wary pets, demonic children, doors that mysteriously open and close and other things that go bump in the night. As it moves along, the camera’s formal compositions begin to tilt and skew in sympathy with the disordering of Amelia’s mind.
Davis’ calibrated performance as the coming-apart Amelia is shattering, recalling Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby and Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Kent has made a first-rate scary movie, one that holds up with the genre’s classics.
Big Eyes (PG-13, 105 minutes) Big Eyes is not one of Tim Burton’s curious fantasies like The Nightmare Before Christmas or James and the Giant Peach. It’s a drama distilled from the real-life relationship between Walter Keane and his wife, Margaret, that started in an era when women were beginning to rear up against what they perceived as male dominance at home and in the workplace.
That’s what Margaret does. And even the most imaginative fantasy writer would be hard-pressed to come up with a more bizarre story.
When the two meet in the 1950s, Margaret (Amy Adams) has had single motherhood thrust upon her, minus child support. After moving from the suburbs to San Francisco’s increasingly hip North Beach, artistically inclined Margaret lands a job painting designs on furniture in a little factory and selling her sentimental paintings of big-eyed waifs at weekend art fairs. That’s where she meets Walter (Christoph Waltz), who presents himself as a sophisticated Frenchtrained painter of Parisian street scenes while sweeping naive Margaret off her feet.
Before you know it, they’re living in matrimonial bliss in an attractive apartment with Margaret’s young daughter, Jane (Delaney Raye), where Walter supports them in comfort thanks to his successful real estate career.
That support extends into dicey territory with Walter’s claims that he is the creator of Margaret’s paintings. He does so, he says to his bewildered bride, so as not to confuse those who mistake him for the artist as he aggressively markets Margaret’s work.
She goes along with this anonymity for a while, watching as her creations become a cultural phenomenon. Then she doesn’t. That’s when Big Eyes snaps out of its dreamy domesticity into a sharply focused firecracker of a standoff between Walter and his suddenly empowered and very vindictive opposition.
Adams couldn’t be better in the coveted role of Margaret — who wouldn’t want to transform from simpering milksop to magnificent warrior woman in less than two hours? Waltz very nearly matches her with a crafty performance that humanizes Walter while not denying his talent at exploitation. With Danny Huston, Jason Schwartzman, Terence Stamp.
Maps to the Stars (R, 112 minutes) A dark, disorienting and acidic comedy in which Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), a renowned TV self-help therapist with a celebrity clientele, leaves it to his wife, Cristina (Olivia Williams), to manage the career of their troubled child-star son, Benjie (Evan Bird), and deal with recent psychiatric-ward occupant daughter Agatha (Mia Wasikowska). With Robert Pattinson, Julianne Moore; directed by David Cronenberg.
God Help the Girl (unrated, 111 minutes) Writer/director Stuart Murdoch (lead singer of Belle & Sebastian) presents a charmingly unfocused, airy coming-of-age musical documentary about indie-pop musicians in the bohemian realm of Glasgow’s West End.
You’re Not You (R, 103 minutes) Good performances just barely save this tougherthan-you’d-think drama from eroding into a made-for-TV tearfest. No wonder, since Hilary Swank plays Kate, a classically trained pianist afflicted with ALS, who finds unexpected solace not from her husband Evan (Josh Duhamel) but from new caregiver and admitted former screw-up Bec (Emmy Rossum, Shameless). With Marcia Gay Harden, Jason Ritter; directed by George C. Wolfe.