Recent movies have begun, more and more, to confront the underreported disappearances of Indigenous women (Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance), and Aboriginal Australian women in particular (Ivan Sen’s Limbo), and the public and institutional indifference to this traumatic truth. There’ve been Aussie horror movies, like The Babadook, which manifest grief and pain into a monstrous physical form. An attempt to combine these ideas seems natural. But writer/director Jon Bell’s The Moogai expands his 2021 short film into just that: An attempt. A standard-issue horror barely making the move from short to feature (it’s only around 80 minutes before credits), The Moogai is a scare-free blunt instrument, imprecise and uninterested in its own genre beyond its potential for metaphor.
It doesn’t help that the Moogai itself looks a bit like a Spirit Halloween Babadook, with long nasty fingers and a black, spindly silhouette. That the Moogai—a Bundjalung boogeyman, a stealer of children—isn’t even halfway scary is representative of its film’s main issue: Despite the palpable pain pulsing beneath the surface, that surface is so generic and transparent as to do away with its own purpose.
As Shari Sebbens and Meyne Wyatt reprise their roles from the short film, as an Indigenous couple (M&A lawyer Sarah and carpenter Fergus) welcoming their second child, we’re hard-pressed to pay too close attention to this by-the-numbers post-pregnancy haunting. We’re disinclined to dive deeper because we’ve so clearly seen it all before. Each scene after Sarah gives birth to her baby boy—dying for a moment on the table, because why not?—was pulled from a horror how-to guide that we’ve all leafed through just by existing in pop culture.
There’s no surprise when a young girl who isn’t daughter Chloe (Jahdeana Mary) starts popping up at night, moving out from the shadows to drive Sarah up the wall. There’s nothing surprising about Sarah’s deteriorating mental state, nor how the movie half-heartedly attempts to blur some of her psychological lines. Is it a haunting? Is it sleep deprivation? Is it postpartum depression? No…no, it’s clearly a haunting.
The only surprising thing about the supernatural wringer the family is put through is the new baby: He’s dropped on his head, whacked against furniture or otherwise given a hard time over the course of his various disappearances, misplacements and reappearances, and the resilient infant takes it like a champ. It’s also unintentionally hilarious once the movie’s lost your investment, which doesn’t take long.
The cartoonish effects and overwrought horror set-ups sap all the strength from the on-the-nose commentary deployed by Bell. Sarah and Fergus live in a classy, upscale apartment, obviously enjoying the wealth brought in from Sarah’s white-collar job with few non-white employees. Following this thread, Sarah—conspicuously raised by a white family after being taken from her birth mother Ruth (Tessa Rose) as a baby—readily rejects Indigenous tradition to her own detriment. The culture clash is especially overwrought between the family members, while Bell structures much of his script’s trajectory around highlighting the institutions that’ve most famously oppressed Indigenous people. Mental hospitals, the medical establishment, fancy schools, white coworkers, the police—betrayal runs rampant through the film, which would make more sense if Sarah showed any indication that she was well-versed in this lived experience as an Indigenous woman. Think of Get Out, where so much tension grew from our immersion in its lead’s realistic suspicions. Rather, in The Moogai, each instance has the tenor of a twist, despite being included as examples of the everyday.
Throughout the script’s obvious, frustrating gaslighting and uninspired horror, Sebbens is hung out to dry. She has such bright, massive green eyes that she already always looks a little bewildered and, when she even halfway emphasizes them, it gets really exaggerated. Bell never brings the rest of the cast up to meet her, nor reins in these reactions, allowing them to be as big and schlocky as the rest of his movie. It’s only when Sarah goes berserk, giving into rage at the indignities and disbelief she’s faced, that the big performance finds its over-the-top groove…and only briefly. So too does Bell’s big visual swings, coming late in the game and only really landing with a single setpiece.
The Moogai’s a monster movie whose monster is barely more than its metaphor. The Babadork hunting our central family has big silly hands and walks in the same upside-down, on-all-fours style that every contortionist practices so that they’re cast in movies like this. It’s a symbol, not just of Indigenous oppression by white colonists snatching up children, but of a silly movie with a deadly serious tone. Bell’s directorial debut lacks confidence or interest in being much of a horror movie, beyond squeezing everything unique and meaningful about its premise into a one-size-fits-all genre template.
Director: Jon Bell
Writer: Jon Bell
Starring: Shari Sebbens, Meyne Wyatt, Tessa Rose, Jahdeana Mary, Clarence Ryan, Bella Heathcote
Release Date: January 21, 2024 (Sundance)
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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