For Your Consideration: Essie Davis, as the Haunted Single Mother in 'The Babadook'
Though it’s only fall, film lovers and Oscar prophets alike have already penciling in their year-end picks and predictions. With so many big-name actors and high-profile movies to choose from, Yahoo Movies humbly submits our weekly reminder of one of 2014’s lesser-known — but certainly award-worthy — films and faces:
Essie Davis
The Babadook
Best Actress
The Oscars have something of a blind spot when it comes to horror, but a few notable exceptions have been made over the years. Kathy Bates, for instance, terrified voters into handing her a Best Actress statuette for her scarily convincing portrayal of a psychotic superfan in Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery. The following year, Anthony Hopkins nabbed a Best Actor Oscar for spending less than 30 minutes of screentime portraying The Silence of the Lambs’ resident cannibal psychiatrist, Hannibal Lecter. With those cases as precedent, it would be a horrifying — though sadly, not unpredictable — oversight for the Academy to ignore the tour-de-force performance that Essie Davis delivers in the acclaimed Australian horror film, The Babadook, which will open in theaters on November 28 after spending much of the past year knocking audiences dead on the film-festival circuit.
Written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Jennifer Kent, The Babadook fuses the atmospheric moodiness of silent classics like Nosferatu,with the psychological horror of such chilling character portraits as Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining. And Davis’s character, emotionally troubled single mother Amelia, certainly feels like a descendent of Mia Farrow’s Rosemary Woodhouse and Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance. While en route to give birth to their first child, Amelia’s husband died in a car accident that almost claimed her life as well. Six years have passed since that fateful night, and while she outwardly appears to have recovered, things are definitely not well inside the home she shares with her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). They get even worse when a pop-up book about the titular creature — a top-hatted phantom with long claws and a disturbing grin — mysteriously apparates on Sam’s bookshelf, a prelude to what Amelia’s unsteady mind processes as a full-on haunting. As her grasp on reality slips away, she lashes out at the people closest to her…including poor, confused Sam.
Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman play a single mother and child in the Australian horror film ‘The Babadook’
One of the frequent knocks made against The Shining is that Nicholson appears visibly unstable from the first scene, thus robbing Torrance’s ultimate transformation into an axe-wielding maniac of any surprise or suspense. (At least, that’s always been one of Stephen King’s major issues with Kubrick’s take on his novel.) Davis begins in a more grounded place, restricting Amelia’s madness to the edges of the frame and letting it creep in slowly until it consumes her. Her increasingly fractured relationship with her son is also closer to the parent-child breakdown that King described on the page, with her instinctive feelings of maternal warmth curdling into hatred for this needy young interloper into her private grief. Just as The Shining is very much a parable about the perils of parenthood, The Babadook effectively plays on the deep-rooted insecurities felt by so many moms and dads, insecurities that manifest themselves in the frightening form of the Babadook itself.
Related: A Children’s Book Becomes a Real-Life Nightmare in New Trailer for ‘The Babadook’
Following Amelia’s mind into its many dark corners would be a challenge for any actress, particularly one best known for playing a cool, calm and collected private investigator on the hit Aussie mystery series, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. But Davis has said that her key to unlocking the role was approaching the character as a flawed human being, rather than a Mommy Dearest-esque monster. “I recognise myself in Amelia and I think a lot of mothers will,” the actress and mom told the Sydney Morning Herald. “Most mothers think they are bad mothers. We all make terrible mistakes, often, and always think we’re getting it wrong. Parenting is meant to be just a natural part of life. You just think you know how to do it but, of course, it’s much more complicated than that. I personally don’t resent having my children, [but] I can understand where this comes from in the character.” Since the Academy already loves to honor actors have that overcome personal demons onscreen, it’s not such a leap to nominate a performer who does battle with an actual demon.
The Babadook opens in select theaters on November 28
Photos: Everett
