In the Realm of the Senses deals with real life human sexual attachment, and it works as a metaphor as well, at least the film's significant 'parts' do, but it's also an interesting anti-structure piece.
The Babadook is in another league altogether. Mostly mild language, nothing extreme or excessive, just the kind of things that a parent destabilizing, at the edge of their nerves, frequently may say to their child in fits of anger.
In the story, the children's book that contains the Babadook monster's story is destroyed, recreated, rewritten and anticipates a series of violent events including an unfortunate end for the dog that takes place off screen. What's very interesting about the making of the movie is that all the language directed at the child had the child off set for those moments. This director went through elaborate extremes to protect the child actor from any of the ill effects such movies about family trauma and abuse can create for young actors. She said the movie took twice as long to make consequently, keeping the real life mother on set as a buffer and support for the child.
I would be loathe to put these two movies together in any way, especially in terms of audience ages. While both anti-structure I would describe Realm as a transgressive movie and the Australian piece as a very instructive, horror, family parable.
As someone who grew up in and around similar fits and starts of the suddenly violent and/or irrational parent I found this movie to be accurately thoughtful. It has the same ring of childhood/adult family trauma truths as found in the recent cinematic version of Where the Wild Things Are. In fact they are companion pieces IMHO as both are gut wrenching for anyone who is acquainted with childhood trauma due to parental violence. I have very strong insights now into why my childhood dream space was so nightmarish. My brain needed to invent monsters to cope with the occasional appearance of real life monsters in the home. Both these films (Wild Things & Babadook) explore these real life tensions and things do get paranormal as a consequence. Life's like that.
Comparatively, in my own household, where we describe yelling as violence, I see that neither of my children went through the weirdo nightmare/monster phase. I kept waiting for it to arrive thinking that was the normal course of childhood - but not so. A calm house makes for good dreams. Go figure. Lessons learned.
