Baby Ruby, 2023.
Written and Directed by Bess Wohl.
Starring Noémie Merlant, Kit Harington, Meredith Hagner, Jayne Atkinson, Reed Birney, Lauren Beveridge, Camila Canó-Flaviá, Amber Janea, Emerald Rose Sullivan, and Erin Wilhelmi.
SYNOPSIS:
After welcoming her baby, Ruby, home, the tightly scripted world of lifestyle influencer Jo starts to unravel. As increasingly sinister happenings mount, Jo is plunged into a waking fever dream where everyone is a threat and nothing is what it seems.
In Baby Ruby – the writing and directorial debut of Bess Wohl, adapting her celebrated stageplay – it’s immediately established that mother-to-be Jo (Portrait of a Lady on Fire‘s Noémie Merlant) is a bit of a control freak. She plans the baby shower herself and runs a lifestyle blog where she can manipulate the outsider’s perspective of her life and inevitable family, as people often do through social media. However, motherhood is unpredictable. It’s not something I can personally attest to, but postpartum depression exists and sounds like a nightmare.
It’s a clever concept to turn the postpartum experience into a psychological horror show, but even at only 91 minutes, Baby Ruby becomes cinematically tiring, hitting the same beat repeatedly. Babies can’t be controlled; they cry a lot. In the case of Ruby, there’s never a moment where she’s not crying around her mom. It’s also worth mentioning that I watched Baby Ruby with the maximum volume on the headphones (that I never bothered to turn down for some reason that confounds me.) Nevertheless, it certainly made for an immersive watch where I somewhat understood where another character was coming from while delivering a harrowing monologue about once having intense thoughts about stabbing her infant son, who wouldn’t stop crying.
Jo’s partner Spencer (Kit Harington of Game of Thrones notoriety), an ethical butcher, is well-meaning but useless in parenting and looking out for Ruby’s mental well-being. At the very least, Ruby doesn’t cry around him. And much like one draw here is that I’ve never seen Noémie Merlant throw herself into mania in an American thriller, the material similarly allows Kit Harington also to succeed in expanding his range as an actor.
That’s not really where the issues lie in Baby Ruby, a film that kicks off with a solid premise before giving too much into boring the lines between reality and hallucination to numbing effect. Jo also befriends a parenting group of mothers, except her visions, start crossing over into these interactions. Still, even without them, it feels as if things are so bizarre that one is not entirely sure if the film is functioning in the real world. There’s also the added psychological wrinkle that Jo no longer has a mom, which causes Spencer to encourage his mother (Jayne Atkinson) to take a more active role in caring for the baby during the postpartum depression, which often leaves Jo out of commission or making life decisions that call into question her fitness to be a parent.
The longer Bess Wohl torments Jo and toys with the audience, these sequences begin to feel hokey, complete with awkwardly forced dialogue that not even the actors can salvage. Her script also falls into the trap of literalizing points of the movie about the American healthcare system and lack of support for new mothers through on-the-nose dialogue, inevitably expressing that mothers need to support one another continuously.
Eventually, Jo concludes that everyone is out to get her and up to no good. Meanwhile, Ruby is highly aggressive, biting her during a breastfeeding session and drawing blood. At a certain point, Baby Ruby is trying too hard to make a statement on postpartum depression while wearing out the audience in the process, and not in a good way. Nearly every decent idea it introduces is overblown and flips over on itself but still, the film is raising and sparking an important conversation.
Baby Ruby is unquestionably never dull to behold, replete with mental freak-outs and frantic editing, including some darkly humorous cutaways with Jo and Spencer talking to doctors. It’s just unfortunate that it potentially works better as a stage play than how Bess Wohl has adapted her work.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
