- Joined
- Oct 3, 2018
If you want to know everything wrong with Kent's craft, just watch her second film The Nightingale.Babadook was a good movie. It's made worse by all the baggage put onto it after the fact, but if you take it just as is, it's a good horror movie that stays true to its roots while still putting in a lot of unique and innovative stuff.
I think it caused a lot of problems because Jennifer Kent was first and foremost trying to make a horror movie, but necessarily told it from a female perspective, and added in the dread of an actual female in that situation. Unfortunately, since then, it seems every single female director has taken up the flag of the second part (focusing on the female perspective) while utterly forgetting the first, and more important part (making an actual horror movie). It's just lazy and band-wagonning, trying to skip the actual craftsmanship, history, and understanding of the genre while getting a free pass to the front of the line.
Her films are nice looking but ultimately pretty mediocre in the writing and relentlessly on-the-nose with the messaging.