Baby Reindeer (2024)
Autobiographical dramatization of scottish comedian Richard Gadd's traumatic experiences with stalking and sexual abuse, starring himself.
One of those quintessentially british productions that are simultaneously rather gloomy and depressing, while also always capable of getting a chuckle out of the sheer absurdity of the situations it presents. Gadd plays his fictionalized self, here named "Donnie Dunn", a struggling stand up comedian working at a London bar as his day job. When, out of sympathy, he decides to buy a lonely middle aged woman a cup of tea, she develops an unhealthy infatuation with him that threatens to ruin his life.
Baby Reindeer is a show many will no doubt find difficult to watch, not only because it deals with some very personal and very intimate situations, but also because it puts great focus on people making some very unwise, often downright self destructive, decisions. Probably to the point some will turn it off in anger at all the ways its characters manage to dig themselves deeper when it seems like simply doing nothing could have resolved their issues.
Well, that's the point though, isn't it? It's a show about people who are very mentally unwell and do very mentally unwell things. Gadd himself is clearly the centerpiece of it all and it's a testament to either his bravery or his self loathing that he manages to portray himself as this pathetic. While the majority of the series deals with the ways being a stalking victim affects his life, a lot of his behaviour is contextualized in an episode midway through that deals with the way he was sexually taken advantage of by a wealthy television writer who gave him drugs and promised him a career in show business.
It's hard not to view Baby Reindeer as a therapeutic exercise to some extent. Gadd mulls over his difficult feelings towards his abuser, towards his stalker, towards his own difficulties coming to terms with his own bisexuality, towards the way all of it destroyed his relationship... it is, by all means, an inherently egocentric project. How much you'll get out of it depends on how relatable and sympathetic you find some the situations presented. And how much you can empathize with the ways people cope with them.
Make no mistake, the cast brings all of it to life marvelously. Gadd really throws himself at this opportunity to reenact some of the lowest points of his life while his opposite Jessica Gunning as his stalker Martha brilliantly portrays a person who can go from harmlessly irritating, to creepy, to genuinely pitiable in the same scene. Nava Mau, playing the put upon girlfriend also deserves a mention, struggling to put up with a partner who seems incapable of working through his baggage.
But in the end the question is whether anything about these sad, pathetic, stupid people and the frustratingly counterproductive ways they try to work through their issues feels relatable to you. And... yeah, some of this actually got me. I know what it's like to deny and dismiss your own trauma, even when it's eating away at you. And I know what it's like to be the weird person sitting alone at a bar and forming an unhealthy attachments to someone who's nice to you out of pity. Not to pretend I've experienced anything close to what the people in this series did, but at least I felt some familiarity to it.
Not to talk this up as some great drama, it has utilitarian cinematography and ends, as productions based on true stories tend to, on a rather arbitrary point. But I do think it portrays some pretty uncomfortable aspects of human behavior very candidly and has a pair of stellar lead performances.
