The Babadook is an Australian horror movie directed by Jennifer Kent. It follows the story of a single mother, Amelia, who is still struggling to get over the death of her husband. Her son, Samuel, is also causing her issues due to his behavioural problems. The film takes a dark turn as a supernatural being from a horror story she read to her son, 'The Babadook,' begins to plague her.
The movie quickly establishes the broken relationship between mother and son through the distance between the two characters on the screen, they are often shown as being quite far away from each other, often with no contact at all. An example of this is during a shot of Samuel and Amelia eating dinner together at the dining table, the two are shown to be sitting at opposite ends of the table which conveys the distance between the two in both a literal and emotional sense. To add to this message during the shot the two are shown to be eating in silence, the only noise is the sound of their cutlery. The emotional distance is reinforced again by physical distance between the two, when Samuel has a bad dream and turns to his mother for comfort only for her to lie on the opposite side of the bed, still without any contact towards him. .
The only contact the two have within the first few minutes of the film is within a sequence where Samuel is terrified of 'monsters' in his bedroom and therefore Amelia has to check in the closet and under the bed for them, he is shown to be clinging to her, however she does not touch him back. In these few shots the two characters are frames, once by the camera being positioned within the closet framing the two with the closet walls, and again with the camera being positioned under the bed framing the two with the underside of the bed being above them and the floor being beneath them. The relevance of the two being framed in these shots represents Amelia's entrapment in her own home due to her son's strong belief in monsters and bad behaviour.
