Mark Reviews Movies: BABY RUBY

Baby Ruby, Magnet Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 2, 2023

Baby Ruby attempts to turn parenthood—and motherhood, with all of the social pressures and cultural expectations and physiological changes that come with it, in particular—into a paranoid thriller of sorts. This movie, from first-time director Bess Wohl, takes something that, in the usual state of things, is already worrying and frightening enough to melodramatic heights that are ridiculous and borderline insulting.

Our mother-to-be is Jo (Noémie Merlant), who lives in a remote and spacious house outside a city with her husband Spencer (Kit Harington). The screenplay's grasp on reality is tenuous early on, considering that Jo is somehow wealthy by running a personal blog—with a personal assistant and an unnecessarily sizeable staff that doesn't seem to do anything—and Spencer is an "artisanal butcher," which not even the characters in the movie seem to buy as a profession.

It would be easy to otherwise ignore such quirks in Wohl's setup, except that the rest of the story continues that absence of logic and realism. To be fair, a lot of that absence is intentional on Wohl's part, although that doesn't help to make it convincing.

Jo and Spencer are happy, jokey, and in love at the start, with the only complications being that Jo is a perfectionist, Spencer's mother Doris (Jayne Atkinson) comes over to visit and offer unwanted advice a little too often, and the couple is just so excited about becoming first-time parents. The waiting doesn't last too long, as Jo goes into labor a bit early.

That's not a problem, but the process of giving birth is presented here as a first-person nightmare of screams and blood. When it's finished, we—and even Jo, it seems—have to wonder if the whole scene was just a dream, and while the birth and the baby are real, Wohl certainly indulges in that uncertainty between fantasy and reality for the rest of the movie.

At first, matters are fairly grounded. Jo struggles to get her newborn daughter to stop crying—cradling, walking with, feeding, and singing to the baby in repetitious montages that give us a sense of the character's irritation turning to despair turning to resentment. Merlant's performance is perfectly adjusted to these changes in the early stages of the story. As Wohl starts toying with reality and perception and the extremes of these feelings, though, the actor unfortunately tries to match the over-the-top tenor of the material, and the performance only magnifies how consistently silly much of this becomes.

The visions and/or nightmares start early for Jo, too. Again, they're reasonable near the start, with Jo worrying about her baby's crying, how the newborn could be hurt by any number of things, and the feelings of failure and helplessness that come with her apparent inability to soothe her own child. It's obvious that Wohl wants to shine a light on these commonplace fears and feelings, if a later scene in which Doris essentially says as much to Jo—and, by extension, the audience—while telling stories about how Spencer often cried as a baby. Wohl even dares to raise some taboos about Jo feeling as if her baby is somehow punishing her and Doris' admission that she once thought of killing baby Spencer out of hopeless desperation for her own sanity.

The central idea here, in other words, is understandable and a bit daring, but Wohl's execution of that theme collapses as either a series of conspiracies unfold around the new mother or Jo loses her hold on reality. There's only one likely answer to the ever-shifting complications and potential threats of the plot—from the baby genuinely seeming to have a grudge against her mother (biting while feeding and appear to lure Jo closer in order to draw blood), to Doris outstaying her welcome and maybe having some sinister motive, to a group of other new mothers in town, whose babies are so quiet that it telegraphs one twist. That it's not really a twist because of another, later one should give one a basic notion of how convoluted these games are in practice.

None of these specific possibilities is developed or, as a result, particularly believable, leaving us only to anticipate the inevitable revelation about the nature of Jo's troubles. Baby Ruby easily could have made its point about the difficulties and concerns of motherhood without indulging in so much exaggerated trickery, but because the movie does, we're left with a story that sacrifices compassion for excess and an uncomfortably broad sense of hysteria.

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