The Babadook

Owing as much to Roman Polanski as Roald Dahl, Jennifer Kent's striking debut feature is a bold and intensely emotional psychological horror. Essie Davis plays a stressed-out care worker struggling to cope with her troubled six-year-old son (Noah Wiseman), who was born on the day her husband violently died. She reads the boy a sinister pop-up book that mysteriously appears on a shelf, but soon comes to question whether the monstrous "Babadook" is as fictional as she first thought. Old school special effects give scary life to the titular black-clad creature in a consistently unnerving allegory on grief and guilt, maternal trauma and madness, and unconditional love and loss. Davis gives a truly monumental performance as the anguished mother who becomes an uncontrollable force of murderous destruction in order to take on every child's worst nightmare.