The Best (And Most Underseen) Australian Films of 2014
Forget the kitchen-sink drama stereotype; 2014 was Australia’s year of genre films. Here's some you might have missed.
The Babadook, dir. Jennifer Kent
Horror films show death in spades, but who knew they could be so terribly sad? The Babadook could be the saddest, truest horror I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t scare; it disturbs. The astonishing debut of Jennifer Kent showed that as a genre, horror can be a truly pure and beautiful form of cinema – richly symbolic, emotionally loaded and character-driven. A brilliant Essie Davis plays a widowed mother not coping with single parenthood, who devolves into a psychosis that’s closely linked with a whack storybook character called Mister Babadook.
I’m not the only one this film messed up; it’s won a New York Film Critics Circle award, cracked the top ten at the box office in the UK, picked up heaps of fans in France, and earned the astonishment of Stephen King, as well as dozens of other critics. So much that some are now calling for a second theatrical release in Australia, where market forces meant it was kept from a prospective local audience.
Though The Babadook’s impeccable design reminded me of early German Expressionism and the loneliness of Dr Frankenstein’s monster, the honesty of its portrayal of a woman in the throes of depression reminded me more of Melancholia (directed by cinema’s most committed pessimist, Lars von Trier). It resists the easy noose of the unethical, exploitative, cheap scares of the slasher genre, and is all the more frightening for it.
If The Babadook marks the start of an elegant, visceral new direction for contemporary horror, it will be a path that even the most horror-phobic viewers can – and will – follow.
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Or try: Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf de Heer, 1993)