Baby Ruby

You can look at it as a dark comedy, a thriller, a horror movie, or as a psychological study. It gets to a lot of truth about how confused you feel when you're a new mom.

[Baby Ruby] operates at a high-pitched melodrama-horror level, and the constant frenzy becomes exhausting.

Disorienting, tense, funny and scary.

Noémie Merlant and Kit Harington's Instagram-perfect life unravels once their bundle of joy arrives in this tense, thoughtful, slightly unfulfilled debut feature from playwright Bess Wohl.

Retro visual flair, such as repeat cuts and mirror effects, add some aesthetic interest to Jo’s spiraling. But “Baby Ruby” hardly whimpers, let alone screams.

Baby Ruby makes a valuable contribution to the emerging cinematic literature on the unspoken realities of women’s lived experience — with style, disarming honesty, and a steady and intelligent hand.

While Bohl’s story is the epitome of a waking fever dream, it never becomes a gloomy slog. Instead, it’s imbued with a playful and inventive campiness that is emblematic of the absurdly torturous realities of parenthood.

The purposely ambiguous cinematography, with its abrupt cuts and perplexing visuals, is clearly a manipulative tool that Wohl uses to great effect.

A disorienting psychological horror-thriller that perfectly captures maternal fears and mental battles new parents can face.


Without firmer direction and more control over genre and tone, what Wohl wants to render as ambiguous gets received with ambivalence.