Baby Ruby review: motherhood gets the modern horror treatment

The mommy blogger life doesn’t suit the faint or fitful of heart— any YouTube video essay can tell you that. Fostering a perfectly imperfect online persona is delicate work, and appearing both coiffed and spontaneous takes dexterity and dedication. The flip side: one crack in the carefully crafted sculpture can wreck everything. And that’s without taking into account the seemingly endless stream of ills that already afflict the modern mother.

In Baby Ruby, the feature film directing debut of Tony-nominated playwright and screenwriter Bess Wohl, the stark duality of postpartum depression serves as both a skeleton in the closet and a monster under the bed. Despite some unevenness, Baby Ruby is a fervently uncomfortable and aesthetically compelling depiction of new motherhood, an unsettling horror exploration buoyed by strange imagery and a no-holds-barred lead performance from Noémie Merlant.

Merlant does Mia Farrow’s Rosemary proud as Josephine, a tightly wound lifestyle blogger and mother to our titular bundle of joy. Jo throws her own baby shower ahead of Ruby’s arrival to assure it’s executed perfectly. She hesitates to seek advice from her peers on her constantly caterwauling child for fear of addressing the obvious: She’s not an infallible parent.

The driving force in Baby Ruby, however, isn’t type-A Jo’s imperfections—it’s the identity crisis they induce. Welcoming her baby home after a bloody birth, Jo starts distrusting everyone around her, from a mysterious group of new mothers to her husband, an ethical butcher named Spencer (Kit Harington). Most of all, Jo fears Ruby, a Gerber Baby-adorable calamity waiting to happen. As she muscles her way through the physical and mental chaos of new motherhood, Jo is dogged by a perceived inability to understand her child and a rising fear that Ruby is angry with her. In one scene, Jo asks a woman evaluating her home’s baby-proofing if the home would be “safe from Ruby” instead of “safe for her.” It’s a precise, simple moment that skillfully sets up the film’s back half.

Merlant, recently seen in the Academy Award-nominated Tár, astutely captures the unwieldy emotional burden of simultaneously loving and fearing something. The only thing that frightens Jo more than Ruby is the prospect that someone somewhere might take the infant, even as Ruby leaves her bruised and bitten from nursing. Merlant only needs a glance to reflect that jagged totality.

Although Spencer’s vagueness lends to a mini-twist, Harington doesn’t add much meat (sorry) to the character, save a flat affability. Despite far less screen time than Harington, Jayne Atkinson leaves more of a mark as Spencer’s overbearing mother, and he’s especially forgettable compared to a tone-perfect Meredith Hagner as a new mom who inspires both admiration and agitation in Jo. (If this film lands one message: never wake a sleeping baby.)

Baby Ruby contains some truly disconcerting moments: A wide shot where a gaggle of mothers trails Jo on an afternoon jog is pure creepy fun, and when the camera skulks around the remote wooded grove where Jo, Spencer, and Ruby live, it effectively emphasizes the gulf between the public and the private. Jo’s attempt to harmoniously wed the two as a lifestyle influencer only leaves her more prone to isolation. Sequestering herself becomes a strange, masochistic addiction even as claustrophobia sets in—if Jo’s not living the perfect life, why share it?

Despite Wohl and cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez’s knack for lasting imagery, indecision sometimes gets the best of Baby Ruby. Kaleidoscopic shots intended to reflect the monotonous experience of caring for an infant feel out of place, and undercut the film’s carefully cultivated sense of dread. Otherwise, Baby Ruby relishes in ambiguity, leaving much of its plot up to interpretation, especially its metaphor-heavy ending. Reality doesn’t rule Jo’s experience, and the end of our time with her is only the beginning of her maternal journey. But that’s the real fright: the primal horror of parenthood can’t be confined to ninety minutes. As a doctor tells Jo of Ruby midway through the film, “Just wait ‘til she’s 18.” The nerve Wohl and her cast tap into is an anxious one.

(Baby Ruby opens in theaters nationwide on February 3.)