#ptstone

Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the most creative and innovative writer-directors of our time. His first hit (if you can call the man’s work hits) was The Lobster (nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay). Now, he’s nominated again for Academy Awards, this time for Best Picture and Best Director for THE FAVOURITE, a riveting story about the power dynamics in Queen Anne’s court.

The script is original, brilliantly funny, and brought to life with performances from Academy Award nominees Olivia Colman (Best Actress), Rachel Weisz (Best Supporting Actress) and Emma Stone (Best Supporting Actress). These three women are nearly perfect in this film. I have not taken kindly to Emma Stone’s tread into ‘serious’ acting, but she’s got more than a few really great moments in THE FAVOURITE. Rachel Weisz is the perfect villain (if she can be called it). More than them both, Olivia Colman as Queen Anne is the phenom of the film. She’s witty, hilarious, beautiful, and empathetic to watch. We laugh, cry, eat, and vomit with her -- gladly.

Lanthimos did not write the script, which garners Tony McNamara and Deborah Davis an Academy Award nomination; however, his staging and keen eye for beauty on screen is essential to the experience that is this film. It really is beautiful to see unfold. It is psychologically thrilling, smart and inventive, breathtaking and clever. Lanthimos can no longer be swept under as simply an absurdist director -- he is among the masters.

Great films remind us why films ought to be made, why they are essentially art -- and this does that. We are involved in a power struggle in every scene, which we see unfold in the lensing, the staging, the music -- GOD, the music -- and the quiet transitions and overlays or cuts.

The Babadook is an Australian film based on a short film entitled Monster, both of which were directed and written by Jennifer Kent. In the film, a widow and her precocious son are left a book on their front porch about a monster called Mister Babadook that haunts and will not stop haunting until he gets what he wants. The book shows up in various forms, the most frightening of which shows up after the mother rips it up and incinerates it. In this formulation, the pop-up book has been glued back together and updated to include scenes where the widow chokes the family dog to death and then her child before slicing her own throat. As the film goes on, the child's behavior gets worse and in the climax, the widow kills the dog and almost kills her son before choosing instead to fight Mister Babadook. In the end, Mister Babadook lives in their basement and is fed by the widow while they live out their now-quiet life in the suburbs.

The target of Mister Babadook's haunting is the widow. The film seems to suggest with its dream sequences in which the dead husband takes the place of the Babadook, a more deceptively evil representation that uses seduction, that the monster itself represents the widow's grief. The Babadook wants the boy, saying more than once to the widow "give me the boy." If the monster represents grief, then, this would seem to say that grief can destroy relationships between survivors of a traumatic event (the father died in a car crash taking his wife to the hospital to give birth to the son). The widow's anger toward her son, which manifests in her lack of acceptance of his behavioral issues, is displaced from her grief onto her son. This anger toward her son, therefore, is a way the haunting affects both the widow and her son. While the monster may be a representation of the widow's grief, it is still a very real and dangerous monster to the child. This is worth noting because in haunting the child, the monster (or the widow's grief) also haunts the widow. In fact, the widow first denies the monster even exists, leaving the son as the only character that believes in the monster. According to the book that began the haunting, denial of the monster only makes him stronger. It is worth noting, also, that denial is often listed as the first step of the grieving process (Kübler-Ross).

The film has been touted as a metaphorical representation of the grieving process, which includes denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. One could chart out the plot of the film onto this process. The haunting is, therefore, used as an impetus to begin this process and see it along its way. In other words, beyond being a metaphorical film, the film is also a horror movie. The placement of this metaphorical interpretation onto the film comes second to the fact that it requires articles of horror in the film itself. These include the scratching sound of the monster's nails, the look of the monster itself, and how the book and its various formulations create fear and creepiness for the characters and the audience.

The Babadook in the wider cultural lexicon has also become a film featuring a monster touted as a "gay icon," which has been explored by many of the largest cultural blogs in Vulture, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and Vox. However, this interpretation of the monster does not rely on its haunting nor does it seem to be anything more than an extended inside-made-outside joke from Tumblr and beyond.

Works Cited

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying. Scribner, 1969.