The Baby review: HBO dark comedy about killer baby lays bare the brutality of forced motherhood

Language: English The archetypal motherhood, as often depicted in cinema and TV, is near-synonymous with unconditional love, nurturing and infallibility. Some of the more evangelical endorsements will even have women believe fulfilling their supposed biological destiny offers the kind of satisfaction that has no known parallel. This idealised notion doesn’t reflect every woman’s truth of course. Films like We Need to Talk About Kevin and more recently _The Lost Daughter_ have challenged the notion with insightful portraits of the ambivalence of “unnatural mothers”. The Baby, a new British dark comedy by Lucy Gaymer and Siân Robins-Grace, joins this new-born canon by exploring motherhood through the perspective of a woman who has no desire to ever have a child but gets stuck with one anyway. With abortion rights under threat in many parts of the world, the show thus gains a ticking-clock urgency. In a most bizarre turn of events, 38-year-old Natasha Willams (Michelle de Swarte) finds herself caring for a creepy toddler who literally lands in her arms. Once it latches on, it refuses to let go, leaving a trail of bodies in its wake. Mommies too, it turns out as the baby has been moving from one mother to another going back five decades. Is there a curse at play? Or is the baby innately evil? Think of The Baby as It’s Alive meets It Follows. The horror and the comedy are sourced from the same anxieties: a woman’s whole life being hijacked by a baby, the all-consuming dread of being forced into motherhood by forces well out of her control, and the constant pressure of thinking, feeling and behaving as society expects mothers to. Talk about a hostile takeover. [caption id=“attachment_10791151” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] A still from The Baby[/caption] An intriguing premise for sure. The kind of premise you half-expect to see in the line-up of Sundance’s Midnight or NEXT sections. Alas, what should have been a feature no longer than 100 minutes is stretched into an eight-episode series that doesn’t justify its length.

What should have been a powder keg of a dark comedy is instead a plodding one, compromised by its deliberate pace, subdued humour and unimaginative set pieces.

When we first meet Natasha, she’s having a girls’ night in with her friends, Mags (Shvorne Marks) and Rita (Isy Suttie). One’s got a newborn. The other announces she’s pregnant and will have her own soon. Natasha, who is not keen on being indoctrinated into this institution yet, is upset all the talk of babies is ruining their night. The mom and the soon-to-be-mom take offence and leave. It’s the kind of confrontation that makes you realise you and your friends aren’t the same people with the same priorities anymore. The next morning, she decides she needs to do some soul-searching, takes a break from her job as a chef at a local restaurant, and drives away to a remote seaside cabin. It’s here that the titular baby falls off a cliff following the body of his previous mother. Every person she hands the baby off to — from the cops to the social services to a store clerk — end up dying in accidents, leaving it right back in her charge.

So begins the manifestation of an endless nightmare. Helping Natasha unearth the mysterious origins of the baby is Mrs Eaves (Amira Ghazalla), an old woman who’s been following the baby’s trail of dead bodies and her connection to its biological mother Helen (Tanya Reynolds). As she puts it, “He’ll bulldoze your life, destroy your relationships, and when he’s got you completely to himself, he’ll destroy you.” The fifth episode delves deep into the mythology to tell a love story that could never be — and the roots of the horrors to come stemming from the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy and the fear of being unloved. The nightmare of a situation Natasha finds herself in helps her confront her own anxieties about motherhood. These anxieties, we learn, are linked to the childhood trauma of her mother Barbara (Sinéad Cusack) leaving her to start a New Age cult of some sort. Though the episodes don’t last more than 30 odd minutes, it is more than likely a yawn will leak out now and again. Instead of striking it rich at the intersection of the nightmare and the absurdity of Natasha’s situation, it drifts along in the uncanny valley of weary disquiet. As the body count piles up, the show grows stale quite quickly, and our own minds drift before they are forced into re-focusing by Lucrecia Dalt’s eerie score. A mix of clarinet, percussion, synths and throaty chants engulf the show in an atmosphere of gnawing angst. As people die all around Natasha and the baby keeps returning to her, de Swarte channels the anxiety of a woman whose autonomy is slowly being robbed by an unplanned baby. The baby, played by brothers Albie Hills and Arthur Hills, is positively spooky. The camera uses its wide-eyed innocence as a blank slate for the disorder it brings. The show strives for an ironic tone, contrasting the coos of the baby with the chaos he creates. But the writing itself suffers from a lack of wit.

Once Natasha is forced into taking care of the baby, her friends and family don’t even question how she ended up with one in the first place because they are bewitched in its presence. They can’t even imagine a woman who doesn’t want one. Society’s stigma is such that a disinclination towards motherhood is seen as a failure of womanhood. Yet, the same society which imposes the responsibility of motherhood on those who don’t want to be mothers is eager to deprive those who want to be, often simply because of their sexuality. We see this in the case of Natasha’s estranged younger sister Bobbi (Amber Grappy), who is desperate to adopt a baby with her girlfriend Sam (Genesis Lynea) but the agency causes needless delays. Where The Baby works is as a study of the pressures and challenges of motherhood. As dark comedies are meant to do, it softens some harsh truths, the kind that most people may find too uncomfortable to acknowledge: that sometimes loving a child isn’t as easy, that raising it is not always enjoyable, and that it’s perfectly okay if you don’t find parenthood the most satisfying, life-changing experience. All eight episodes of The Baby are now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru. Read all the  **_Latest News_** _,_  **_Trending News_** _,_  **_Cricket News_** _,_  **_Bollywood News_** _,_  **_India News_**  and  **_Entertainment News_**  here. Follow us on  Facebook_,_  Twitter and  Instagram_._