‘The Baby’ is a new horror comedy co-produced with SKY, and produced by Sister and Proverbial Pictures, for HBO Max, where it is being broadcast chapter by chapter. With eight half-hour episodes, the series presents a dark and funny look at motherhood, from the perspective of a woman who doesn’t want to be. A simple proposal a priori, but which leaves on the table some issues that are more subversive than they seem.
Michelle De Swarte She plays Natasha, a 38-year-old woman furious that all of her closest friends keep having children, while all of their shared plans isolate her. Suddenly a baby unexpectedly lands in his hands and his life implodes dramatically. An unexplained miracle that results in the presence of a small but incredibly cute controller and manipulator who twists Natasha’s life into a surreal horror show when the churumbel starts killing people.
Every time she tries to get rid of him, people die around her, and soon Natasha will seek ever more desperate attempts to get rid of him without affecting other people. The last thing she wants from her is to take care of the child, but he only wants her. Almost like an absurd variation of ‘It Follows’ (2014) as he discovers the true extent of the baby’s mortal nature, he knows that his situation is a curse that has passed through different mothers for more than he knows.
Amira Ghazalla is Mrs. Eaves, who has spent the last fifty years living in her car and seems to always follow the Baby. As a horror comedy, it’s not that ‘The Baby’ is hilarious or too creepy, but instead seeks a corrosive humor tone closer to what we can find in ‘Russian Doll’; both for its ditzy female lead and for an absurd sensibility that touches on the macabre at times and remains opaque in terms of her rules for both the bewildered protagonist who finds herself at the mercy of disturbing forces.
A twist on the malevolent children trope from ‘The Prophecy’
The true nuance of the work is that the protagonist does not become a mother, nor does she want to spend her time with children, and is forced to take care of one who little by little is tearing her morals to shreds, while the people around her do not see nothing unusual about the situation. A premise as simple as rich in suggesting normally ignored problems around motherhood.
However, his proposal is far from the typical look at demonic children in popular culture, from the Twilight Zone of ‘It’s A Good Life’ to ‘The Prodigy’, but it is based on the mother’s conflict before a problematic child and his unassuming satiation that provokes rejection within an assumed and institutionalized relationship. The baby here is a dangerous but silent power, through very cute lookswith wide eyes that are only creepy when we know what the consequences are, and little by little it causes some anxiety just by looking at it.
Natasha is a woman used to evading responsibilities throwing sarcasm, but in her new situation it is useless and her reaction to misfortune is quite recognizable and earthy, remaining as the anchor of the story. when it gets weirder and expands its mythology, sometimes a little less dynamic than expected in a series of only eight episodes. The good thing about this vision is that he flees from the typical cloying morality where the adult softens and learns to love life.
A hidden manifesto on free abortion?
Of course, Natasha evolves throughout the series, but it’s not as simple a vision as learning to empathize with her friends with children or changing her mind about having her own. The baby is a manifestation of one of her worst nightmares, but it also functions as a corrosive metaphor about the marketing of women’s bodies and the disheartening feeling of being forced into parenthood by forces completely out of control.
It is not difficult to find parallels with the elimination of the abortion access law by governments, especially now in the United States, with what the subtext seems more relevant than ever and joins horror films dealing with pregnancy and motherhood from a controversial perspective and outside idealizations promoted by defenders of the family, such as ‘Babadook’ (2014), ‘Prevenge’ (2016) or the recent ‘Dark truth’ (False Positive, 2021).
In the absence of some chapters, it remains to be seen if ‘The Baby’ will round off its parody with something beyond the eccentricity associated with its way of presenting the dilemma, but it does leave intelligent surprises and an attractive character that we want to know more about, but If there is something to highlight in the series, it is its unusual, captivating and atmospheric soundtrack by Lucrecia Dalt.full of African and coral textures, which give the whole body of terror and make us doubt if what we see is really a comedy.