Baby Ruby

Postpartum depression, a severely important medical condition, is explored with mixed results in Baby Ruby. A film that sadly suffers from endless jump scares and writing issues, as it ends up having an intentionally amusing outcome. The film attempts to be engaging and empathetic from a female perspective, and the connection extends to some needed viewpoints about motherhood and femininity as it explores a mother’s deepest anxieties after which, includes anger anxiety, depression, conspiratorial thinking, and more frustrations dealing with the lofty responsibilities of raising a newborn. Unlike several horror films that have explored this topic, renowned playwright Bess Wohl’s debut feature aims to effectively explore these uncertainties of motherhood, but the material is dampened with a monotonous structure and many ill-advised shock tactics.

With an unsuccessful mishmash of horror and melodrama, Wohl’s film could have played out better had it more played out as a surrealist horror movie or if it relied more on imagery and atmosphere. While the film channels some elements of Rosemary’s Baby, the film’s execution within its cinematic language never reflects the hysteria and anxiety that its protagonist is feeling. Most of the scenes staged by Wohl and the cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramirez feel rushed and not throughout well on a conceptual level, making the end result does not feel as creepy as it could have been. The film focuses on Jo (Noemie Marlant–Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Tar), a distinguished lifestyle blogger, who just gave birth to her baby daughter named Ruby, in which Jo finds herself slithering into an abyss of chaos. Wohl’s film has a strong build-up, but it becomes very narrow in its scope, where Jo’s new life as a mother becomes very one-note.

Courtesy Magnolia Pictures 

The disquietude Jo feels is the uninterrupted crying from Ruby, which also leads to other erratic behaviors from the newborn, as Ruby intentionally bites her breasts and nipples as she breastfeeds her. It has all the markings of feeling creepy, but it becomes just one recycled jump scare after the other including a really bad one where Jo wakes her husband, Spencer, where the dog is chewing on a bone of leftover meat Spencer brought home from his butcher shop. Another laughably bad gag involves Spencer asking where Ruby was after a night of loud crying, and the camera edits to a steaming pot to suggest Jo possibly put Ruby in there. Again, all of these could sound ominous on paper, but the way it is cut and executed isn’t effective. I try to imagine what Kiberly Dent or Nikyatu Jusu would have done had they put their visual sensibilities to the table because Wohl’s script and ideas are brutally honest, but even its approach is genuine, and it is undermined by one ill-advised moment after the next.

On a storytelling level, the film never reaches its potential either. In between the “is that a dream or not” sequences lies some potential for biting satire about online vanity, as Joe is the self-made entrepreneur who has made a career of getting a following on her blog. Yet she never uploads one picture of Ruby on her blog, even after every woman in her community inquiries about the picture. Unfortunately, these elements never ignite and serve more as just a background which holds a lot of makings of a study of narcissism merged with postpartum depression, which could have added more intricacies to the character and narrative.

Courtesy Magnolia Pictures

While baby Ruby is depicted as a rabid little monster who constantly cries, bites, and drives Joe off the edge, eventually Ruby stops crying whenever she is around someone else, even Spencer and his mother Doris (Jayne Atkinson) can soothe her over. Joe ends up taking it very personal, she begins to feel Ruby has it out for her and everyone else informs Jo that it is just a normal thing that babies do including Ruby’s pediatrician. Jo begins something suspicious and even sinister at work, possibly thinking Spencer, Doris, and even other neighbors in the community are plotting something against her motherhood that she can’t quite figure out.

From there, everything is in Jo’s mindset. The film plays on the first-person perspective mind state, where we get shocking and hallucinatory images, where you don’t know what’s real or what’s being imagined. Is there a larger conspiracy at play? The film covers some essential issues of motherhood, feminity, and postpartum depression, but it oversimplifies its ideas in the conclusion with its self-help babble. The end result is exhausting and disappointing, especially since there is so much build-up and no pulse to the payoff. While most of the films character are caricatures, Noemie Marlant’s performance is raw and intelligent enough that prevent it from being a trainwreck, yet it’s not enough to anchor the movie.

Baby Ruby is now playing in limited theaters and VOD