‘Baby Ruby’ is a Paranoid Pregnancy Horror with a Bite

Evil babies and baby evils.

I'm 99 percent sure that most babies come from the Devil — and as descendants of evil, they’ll try with everything they have at their disposal to make you, the parent, meet their master. The little hellspawns scream their lungs out all night to keep you awake, shit and piss on you, and even bite your nipples until they bleed. Attempting to steal your every waking moment and hoping you’ll eventually drop dead from sleep deprivation (which is why I’ll probably never have kids since I’d die within the first month). To put it simply: infants want to kill you. And as a new, exhausted, and desperate parent, you’re not crazy (or guilty) for thinking that. Bess Wohl’s directorial feature debut, Baby Ruby, embraces all that horror and magnifies it to an extreme extent.

Jo (played by Lydia Tar’s assistant Noemie Merlant) and her husband Spencer (Game of Thrones alumni Kit Harrington) await their first child in a gorgeous upstate home with abundant joy. As a lifestyle blogger, Jo keenly updates her widely popular website with photos and posts, sharing every detail of her wonderful pregnancy. Maybe not as vocal, but Spencer, a professional butcher, is equally enthusiastic about their first baby too. However, that excitement vanishes right after their daughter Ruby arrives.

After a grueling and excruciating birth, Jo’s perspective about becoming a new mom shifts drastically. First, she loses track of time; one day, she wakes up and realizes a month passed by, and she didn't even share a single picture of her daughter online. Then she starts seeing things (a result of exhaustion from lack of sleep) that are deeply unsettling. Regardless of trying various proven methods to calm and make her baby sleep, Ruby cries all the time. Her mother endures as much as she can, but inevitably Jo slowly becomes exasperated and desperate. She begins thinking that something might be wrong with Ruby. Maybe she’s angry at her. Maybe she’s trying to warn her about something dark happening. Or, you know, as I pointed out before, perhaps she's just pure evil.

Yet everyone around Jo (including her husband, mother-in-law, and doctor) keeps assuring the neo-mamma that what she experiences is normal. It’s postpartum — and babies cry, that’s what they do. Yeah, yeah, yeah… but what if there’s something sinister going on? What if Jo is gaslighted to believe what the people around her want her to believe? What if none of this is normal, and there's a conspiracy she can't solve because no one lets her? What if she and Ruby are actually in danger?

The plot of Baby Ruby is smartly told in an indirect way to keep us as close to Jo’s fragmented perspective as possible. We only see what she sees, and we only know what she knows. Her increasing paranoia and psychosis simultaneously affect our thinking too — it’s like a constant eerie whisper, telling us to look for ominous signs. The purposely ambiguous cinematography, with its abrupt cuts and perplexing visuals, is clearly a manipulative tool that Wohl uses to great effect. Her protagonist is confused about what’s real and what’s not, and so are we. It’s sneaky storytelling to twist the narrative into a mind-boggling and confusing plot, but it works. This dreadful ambiguity allows us to indulge in conspiracy theories, building a sick and aberrated fantasy in our minds that might (or might not) help us figure out what’s going on here. The writer-director provides just enough creepy details to keep feeding whatever phantasmagoria we started imagining in our heads.

For instance, Jo's immediate social circle is filled with attractive and alarmingly upbeat young mothers who seem too relaxed to be fresh parents. Oddly, as much as they go on and on about their little ones and the wonders of parenthood, we never actually see their newborns. They’re always out of sight, carefully tucked away in strollers, and each attempt Jo makes to peek at them is shut down aggressively. Shelly (the Instagram-perfect Meredith Hagner), the “head” of the local moms, is the most suspect. Although she’s the one who gets the closest to Jo, Shelly keeps refusing to show her baby. From their first encounter, we're almost positive she has an ulterior motive. Wohl slowly grows this suspicion by placing the character in weird situations and interactions with our hero. Eventually, we learn why she’s being so secretive — and although the explanation is underwhelming — it aptly serves the movie’s primary trick: making us pay attention to the wrong things.

Relying on our horror-trained and intricacy-ridden brain that’s used to the most fucked-up, disturbing stories told in similar films, Wohl successfully gaslights us into thinking more of what we see than what’s actually there. Intentionally, she gives us fuel all the way: the hint for an “evil spawn” at the start immediately brings to mind a classic like Rosemary’s Baby and other horrors that ride a similar wave. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we run with that idea throughout the 90 minutes, giving in to the impression that something must be terribly awry here — thus the creepy and alarming setup. And Baby Ruby keeps feeding us these contorted clues to read something dark and menacing into its narrative until the very end just so it can shock us with utter simplicity.

Now, I must say, the trick only works if you’re a hardcore horror fan. You need to have a sick and deviant imagination to truly buy into the themes here in order to get baffled by the ending — which, at first, won’t feel as satisfying as you might want it to be. But if you think of the lengths the movie was willing to go to deceive and make you believe something that isn’t necessarily there, you might appreciate its deft and calculated manipulation as much as I have.

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Last week, I reviewed Paramount+’s new twisty spy-thriller, Rabbit Hole, for Paste Magazine (Kiefer Sutherland is back, baby!). This week, I wrote about Space Oddity for That Shelf, a charming and heart-warming small-town dramedy about family, grief, and a strange expedition to Mars.

There was no newsletter last week because I was overwhelmed with work and some personal stuff, but I’m planning to write about some new and returning shows (both Yellowjackets and Succession are back) as well as upcoming movies in some form. Stay tuned and share this newsletter with someone else who you think would enjoy it, too. Also, now you can buy me a Ko-fi to support The Screen financially.