Baby Ruby

Baby-Ruby
Baby Ruby

Baby Ruby

10-15 years ago, these words would have been complete gibberish. The implications were straightforward: Your baby should be online. If your baby isn’t online that means something is wrong. Or did I just miss the photo? What’s wrong? It’s weird you haven’t posted a picture of your baby online.

This comes early in “Baby Ruby,” the first play written and directed by Bess Wohl. Jo (Noémie Merlant), a French lifestyle blogger living “upstate” with her husband Spencer (Kit Harington), has just had a baby. Given that she built a brand “curating” her stylish French-woman-in-America life, it’s not an unfair question coming from a befuddled fan.

Everything else goes up on a lifestyle blog. You “monetize” your personal life. You write about the baby shower, peppering the post with affiliate links; the nine months of pregnancy provided so much “content”! Then radio silence once the baby is born. They’re worried and then they’re mad.

“Baby Ruby” is about postpartum psychosis whereafter depression has taken everything from you, how do you reckon with losing your mind? and Jo’s belief that her newborn baby is angry with her somehow; Ruby is seen by Jo as a raging malevolent hellbeast. She cries all the time, and Jo takes it personally: Like the kid is “punishing” her for something; there’s some flaw in Jo’s character only Ruby perceives.

The pediatrician tells Jo, “Babies cry.” Everyone tells her this; but she can’t shake it: Ruby seems hostile to her paranoia ratchets up she starts wondering if Spencer and his mother (Jayne Atkinson) are in cahoots; if their neighbors are on the level; or if there isn’t something sinister going on.

Wohl keeps the film in tight first-person, so that Jo’s increasingly terrified mindset is made manifest visually with lots of shock cuts and hallucinatory elements where you’re not sure what’s real and what isn’t. Which makes it hard to tell: Does she really go out for “Mom drinks” with the breezily gorgeous group of local women who go running every morning pushing baby carriages in front of them? Spencer seems like a good guy, and although his mom might be a little overbearing, they are also rightly concerned. Or it all might be some “Rosemary’s Baby” shit. Jo just can’t be sure. Neither can we.

The movie “Baby Ruby” is like a soap opera set in a haunted house, and it’s too much. Its nerves are shot; the terror is tired. In “Rosemary’s Baby,” the fear comes from the fact that we can tell Rosemary isn’t crazy she’s right: Something is wrong with her baby, something is up with those neighbors, her husband is in on it, there really is a satanic cult next door.

But in “Baby Ruby,” for all its pot boiling on the stove obviousness as metaphor for new motherhood fear, there are only so many did I just dream it or did it really happen moments one film can take. There are two genuinely creepy things about “Baby Ruby”: One has to do with Jo’s shadow on the wall; the other involves her reflection in a window. These moments are haunting and psychological, richly symbolic but they are also lonely ones.

I keep thinking of that fan asking why Jo didn’t put pictures of her baby online yet. Why did Bess Wohl make Jo an influencer instead of giving her a regular job? That book Spencer reads aloud from about parenting advice could have been written by Jo herself except she’d never publish anything so clichéd. She’s not cliché! She will not need some book from the ’80s telling her what to do; that would be passé and probably problematic anyway. Jo will be mumming beyond that advice for this new generation.

It’s in this overheated arena of cultural observation entitled girl-boss culture meets pick me girl turned new mom meets regular private citizen who starts acting like a celebrity/authority figure for no reason besides being a mother in public where “Baby Ruby” really snaps into focus as social satire, not quite as sharp as “Ingrid Goes West,” but close. Unfortunately, those elements play more like background noise here than the main event. Instead, we get scene after scene of Jo seeing scary things and then “waking up” to realize it was all a dream or maybe it wasn’t.

Birth is a physical trauma. The body and mind need time to heal; hormones rage as internal and external pressures mount; you are supposed to be in bliss; you are supposed to already know how to parent; you are supposed to lose the baby weight. Being Extremely Online which Jo is only exacerbates these pressures, something your average lifestyle blogger will never cop to.

Jo expects her daughter to react with gratitude for being placed inside this meticulously curated world made just for her. Ruby does not respond that way. Jo’s existential crisis here resembles the one Sylvia Plath so chillingly described in her short poem “Child,” where she wrote of what she wanted her child’s eye always to see: beautiful things not this troublous/Wringing of hands, this dark/Ceiling without a star.

There is power in those words, and validation there too for new mothers who suffer from postpartum depression. But “Baby Ruby” backs off from that commentary at the last second, when instead it should press its point further like any good influencer would do.

Watch Baby Ruby For Free On Gomovies.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top