Making her feature debut after years of service as a playwright, writer-director Bess Wohl has no idea what to do with the premise of Baby Ruby beyond turning it into a bit of empty entertainment that furthers a genre we can call momsploitation. New motherhood is a curse in this story, which follows the first several weeks (or, perhaps, hours) of a young woman after giving birth to her first child, a daughter. After a succinct set-up, the movie becomes a paranoid thriller, but then fails to deliver on its promise.
The swift turn rubs us the wrong way, mostly because Wohl barters in some frankly exploitative paranoid-thriller imagery. The material isn’t even done any favors by the actress playing our protagonist, which is saying something when the performer in question is the intimidatingly talented Noémie Merlant. Nothing the actress does here is really wrong. It’s far more an issue of the surface-thin material. Merlant’s Jo is mostly a device used by Wohl’s screenplay on whom to hang the heavy-handed symbolism of the mental destabilization brought about by parenthood, rather than a genuine character with thoughts and feelings and emotions about any of this.
The problems begin immediately for Jo, a French expat whose sole source of income is as a professional influencer working for corporate clients. She also has a significant online following invested in her personal life, and the imminent birth of her first child with Spencer (Kit Harington, serviceable but struggling against a barely passable American dialect) is the latest craze on a certain social media platform. Once Ruby comes into their lives, Jo’s grip on reality rapidly slips, with various hallucinations of entire neighborhood walks and car rides and babysitting sessions mixing dangerously with loss of sleep and the dread of postpartum depression.
None of this stuff is particularly out of the ordinary when it comes to a woman’s first journey through motherhood. But even the existential terror of such a universal situation as parenthood is whiffed by the cartoonish horror. Furthermore, the relationships suffer. Jo criticizes Spencer’s job as an “artisanal butcher,” whatever that is, though this seems like a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. The relationship with Spencer’s mother Doris (Jayne Atkinson) suffers, and Jo may even be to blamed for sparking a forbidden romance with the resident neighborhood “helicopter mom” Shelly (Meredith Hagner). That’s about as human as things get here, and Wohl does little to explore it.
Mostly, the movie slips in and out of our perceptions of reality as predictably as one might expect from this particular subsection of the paranoid-thriller genre. The editing is aptly disorienting, and the cinematography is admirably claustrophobic. Unfortunately, some competence in the filmmaking is about all the credit Baby Ruby is able to muster. The rest of the film is just so much hot air, a kernel of an idea that never develops into maturity.
Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing
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