Baby Reindeer Review – Traps You In Its Warped Quicksand of Abuse
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“Why did it take you so long to report it?”
That’s a standard uncomfortable question women hear from cops when they gather the courage to report crimes like rape, stalking, and harassment. We’ve seen it often enough on screens, so it hit differently to see the same question being posed to a man when he goes to report a woman who has been stalking him and spamming him with lewd/bizarre emails for months in the Netflix series “Baby Reindeer”. But the back-story isn’t as simple as you’d expect it to be.
Written and created by Richard Gadd, the seven-part series is based on his experience with a female stalker. Her increasingly aggressive advances push him toward facing buried trauma and confronting crippling truths about his own twisted personality. Richard Gadd plays protagonist Donny Dunn, a bartender who does stand-up comedy on the side, while Jessica Gunning portrays Martha Scott, a woman who claims to be a lawyer and starts to stalk and harass Donny. One might be tempted to think this series would be along the lines of Netflix docu-series “Lover, Stalker, Killer”, a story about a man being stalked by a dangerous woman, but it’s far more nuanced and convoluted.
Episode one of “Baby Reindeer” begins with Donny at the police station reporting Martha for stalking him for six months, and then flashbacks begin to reveal how it all started. Martha walks into the pub where Donny works, frazzled, upset over something, and when he asks her what she’d like to order, she says she doesn’t have the money to buy anything. So Donny offers her a cup of tea on the house, out of sheer pity, but Martha lights up like she has been asked out to prom by the boy of her dreams. And thus begins Donny’s bizarre entanglement with Martha Scott, which begins to get nightmarish as time passes.
The next few episodes explore how Donny doesn’t do much to dissuade Martha, not until he begins to date a trans-woman called Teri (Nava Mau), who becomes the target of Martha’s ire. Things take a much darker turn in episode 4, where Donny’s trip to the police station to report the stalking triggers ugly memories of his traumatic experience with a writer called Darrien. Episode 4 of “Baby Reindeer” is the most challenging to get through and marks a definite turning point in a viewer’s perception of Donny, casting his ordeal with Martha in a completely new light.
Nava Mau is exceptional as his new girlfriend Teri, a mental health practitioner who isn’t even aware of his past. However, she minces no words when she forces him to face the truth – he takes perverse joy in the disturbing display of attention he receives from his stalker. But the stand-out performance comes from Jessica Gunning, she kills it as Martha, a lonely woman who spins a web of lies about herself and is creepily intimidating in stalking her prey. She is unhinged, violent, larger-than-life, suffering from extreme mood swings, and is strangely both the most straightforward yet complex character of “Baby Reindeer”.
Richard Gadd’s Donny serves as the narrator for “Baby Reindeer,” a nickname Martha often uses for him. He is swift in his delivery of the story, maintaining a perky pace for his unsettling experiences. From his awkward, unfunny stand-up comedy shows to his excruciatingly embarrassing exchanges with Martha, the series offers a voyeuristic dive into the troubled life of Donny. He often lets Martha off the hook out of pity, believing she needs help. Ironically, and perhaps sadly, he fails to acknowledge that he needs help too. In fact, it’s almost frustrating how Teri, despite boasting multiple times about being a therapist, never advises Donny to seek help.
The funny thing is, I thought episode six was the last episode, it has Donny Dunn deliver a cathartic monologue about his struggles at one of his stand-up shows, a scene which was similar to a climactic scene in Bollywood movie “Kho Gaye Hum”, another Netflix offering. If the creators wanted to, they could have ended the story right there, and maybe “Baby Reindeer” would have seemed complete at that point. But episode seven turns things up again, bringing a significant high point to Donny’s life for the first time. But just when Donny and the viewers think he might have rid himself of his monsters, they don’t just come back to bite him; he himself goes looking for some of them.
“I knew she was mad, I knew she was dangerous, but she flattered me and that was enough” – Donny has this to say about Martha in one of the concluding episodes, and that’s really his undoing. Attention and adulation are like a drug for him, so scarcely found that he’d take it from anywhere. Unfortunately, Martha, his stalker, becomes like a spurious drug in his life, giving him a high he can’t admit to, not until it starts affecting his friends and family.
“Baby Reindeer” manages to be consistently unsettling and awkward, rarely funny, especially since Donny is supposed to be a failing comedian who cannot get people to laugh – and the writers 100% deliver his lack of humor. There are plenty of scenes featuring his stand-up comedy, and even the bits where the audience does laugh at his jokes weren’t funny, not to me at least. If you aren’t a fan of British humor, you’ll probably feel the same. (Although I am not immune to British jokes, and think Diane Morgen’s act as Philomena Cunk is incredibly hilarious.)
Richard Gadd as Martha’s “Baby Reindeer” is a strange mash of the archetypal “babe in the woods” meets “tormented creative soul”. Donny Dunn is the kind of character that literary students could write pages about. Even if I were to write an entire article focusing solely on his character traits, I wouldn’t be able to determine what viewers are supposed to feel about him. He is a complex shade of grey, with too much darkness and just a hint of light, a shade he refuses to embrace. Instead, he voluntarily crawls into darker spaces, stewing in pain, fear, and anxiety, as if discomfort is his true solace.
The climactic chapter of “Baby Reindeer” brings Donny Dunn’s bizarre brush with Martha to a tragic end and the last scene cleverly ends the series on an ironic note. It’s a pretty solid ending, which doesn’t really bring down the curtains on the protagonist’s journey and instead gives Richard Gadd plenty of scope to bring viewers a “Baby Reindeer 2”. Watch the show if you’re ready to experience some second-hand angst, confusion, and turmoil. In-fact, watch it regardless.
“Baby Reindeer” is available on Netflix.
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