New motherhood isn’t so much a cause for happiness as it is a descent into horror in acclaimed playwright Bess Wohl’s feature-length directorial debut, Baby Ruby. As soon as Jo (Noémie Merlant), an influential lifestyle blogger, welcomes her daughter into the world, she finds herself slipping into madness. Tinged with a shrieky melodrama, the film is so stubbornly yoked to Jo’s postpartum-addled mindset that it’s only a matter of time before its depiction of the fear and uncertainty of motherhood gives in to monotony.
The horrors that Jo endures include imagining that Ruby is deliberately biting her during breastfeeding and, in what suggests an unironic riff on Rosemary’s Baby, believing that her family wants Ruby for sinister purposes. It’s one corny, unintentionally hilarious scare after another, none more lurid than the one where Jo’s husband, Spencer (Kit Harington), joins his zombie-like wife in the kitchen and, after asking where Ruby is, the camera pans down to a steaming pot, teasing us with the possibility that Jo has Fatal Attraction-ed her child.
Baby Ruby isn’t without its sensitive and brutal insights into the difficulties of being a new mother, as evinced by the advice that Spencer’s mother (Jayne Atkinson) occasionally gives to Jo, but they’re rendered trite by the sheer silliness that defines the film’s shock tactics. Jo’s swanky lifestyle and the pressures of influencer expectations—one through line in the film is Jo being prodded about when she’s going to upload a picture of Ruby to social media—never feel oppressive in ways that make her distress especially convincing. As such, Jo’s breakdown simply feels like the shell of an idea without anything important growing inside it.
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