Trust Issues
Minor spoilers of Netflix’s “Baby Reindeer” ahead.
If one were to make an argument for the superior emotive capacity of the moving picture as an art form, a good starting point might be a close-up of Richard Gadd’s face. A tight zoom on the actor is an embodiment of the power of the camera. Gadd’s face is creviced, angular, taut. Sections of his head exist on their own flat planes, divided up by sharp edges that conspire to create discrete facial features; the nose jarringly gives way to the cheekbones, which break suddenly in deference to temples dotted with snaking veins, which are interrupted again by conjoining panels of forehead (themselves partitioned by dramatic frown marks shooting from the bridge of the nose). This is not the face of a famous actor; it’s far more profound, laced with its own style and realism, the Scottish love child of Picasso and de Sica. In the right light, it’s charming, light, even a little bit goofy. Dim the room just a bit, though, and Gadd transforms. Darkness enhances his eye sockets, circles of exhaustion reveal a piercing gauntness, and suddenly those disparate facial features echo with a creeping dissonance; eyebrows are intense as the mouth remains calm, the jaw clenches while pupils stay relaxed.
This is the perfect face for Donny, the protagonist of Netflix’s “Baby Reindeer,” which Gadd both created and stars in. The show, based on Gadd’s own experience (though just how true to reality it sticks has emerged as a cause of controversy as the series exploded in popularity this month), reveals the curious case of the aspiring comedian’s evolving relationship with Martha, a bubbly, overweight woman claiming to be a high-profile London lawyer who appears one day at the pub where Donny tends bar. Martha’s down on her luck; she can’t afford, she claims, the cup of tea he offers her in lieu of a proper pint. Charitably, Donny pours her a freebie, which lights up Martha’s day and keeps her coming back for more. This first encounter sets off a truly unbelievable set of events over the series’ seven total episodes. In a train of escalating intrusions (ranging from hundreds of daily unintelligible, lewd emails to prank calls to Donny’s parents) Martha inches closer and closer to Donny’s psyche, forcing him to confront a series of personal and professional paradoxes against the backdrop of his transitional early thirties.
It all starts with that opening sequence, though. Because the show begins with a cold open (Donny at the police station, begging an officer from behind a glass panel to investigate a stalking case), the audience knows Martha is bad news as soon as she walks through the door. The show’s central question, then, isn’t, “Will Martha stalk Donny?” but instead the far more interesting: “Why does Donny let Martha stalk him for so long?” It’s a gripping question, and it left me, mere minutes into the show, on the edge of my seat, ready to pick out clues the show seemed ready to leave scattered over the next seven episodes. Very quickly, though, I sunk back into my chair. “Baby Reindeer,” it turned out, wasn’t going to make me do much work to solve its central mystery. It was just going to tell me.
“I felt sorry for her,” Donny says in a voiceover as Martha walks into his pub for the first time. “That’s the first feeling I felt.” The monologue continues over a cut to Donny’s face—that face—as he peers over at the woman.
“It’s a patronizing, arrogant feeling, feeling sorry for someone you’ve only just laid eyes on, but I did.” Then, again, in case we didn’t hear it the first time: “I felt sorry for her.”
It’s not that my interest was totally zapped from that point on—there’s enough worth watching here to stick around—but my absorption as a viewer deadened at that very early moment. Why should I pay close attention to this, my TV brain automatically went, if the show is just going to explain it all to me in the end anyway? It’d be one thing if the moment were a one-off, but the ubiquity of predictable narration and voiceover, from beginning to end, is both “Baby Reindeer”’s central feature and flaw.
Narrator Donny is there to explain how his character is feeling at practically every one of the show’s inflection points, even (and especially) when his position is contextually obvious. On his unorthodox living arrangement with an ex-girlfriend’s mother: “It was a strange living situation to be shacked up with the twice-divorced, grieving mother of my ex-girlfriend.” Ditching a date on the tube when things become too publicly intimate: “It is so devastating to think of yourself as a progressive person, only to realize you’re a coward underneath it all.” Rescheduling a comedy gig to avoid Martha’s rancid heckling: “It was incredible, really, just how quickly things seemed to be falling apart.” You don’t say. It’s an intricate show, with at least four major plotlines and a few jumps in time, so I understand its instinct to simplify things. There’s such a thing as onscreen oversimplification, though, and here creativity, intrigue, and thoughtful examination are all sacrificed on the altar of hyper-clarity. We don’t need Donny to tell us he feels sorry for Martha the first time he sees her; we only need to look at his face.
I suspect Gadd’s over-reliance on monologue is related to his project’s first iteration. “Baby Reindeer” was originally conceived for the stage; it ran as a one-man play at the Edinburgh Festival in 2019. Onscreen, the show doesn’t quite seem to realize that it’s no longer bound to the restrictions of the theater. I didn’t see “Baby Reindeer” onstage, but as a one-man show it’s safe to presume Donny’s narration was essential in that context to create atmosphere for an information-starved live audience. Executing for the screen, obviously, is its own beast, replete with limitless opportunities to enrich storytelling through an array of technical tricks—from basic zoom work to time-warping editing—unthinkable on the stage. Aside from some occasional cliched creepy-stalker-movie music, where is the weirdness in this filmmaking? What did the onscreen adaptation of this story do that a live version couldn’t have? “Baby Reindeer” lacks the force of a consistent, mature filmmaker who might have been willing to responsibly experiment with the camera to match the show’s visual presence to the profundity of its themes (Weronika Tofilska directed the first four episodes and Josephine Bonebusch the final three, but these issues are too comprehensive to place at their feet alone). It’s TV malfeasance of the highest order to deprive such a peculiar show of any deserving technical strangeness, to lean on the crutch of voiceover so heavily amidst a story this thematically rich.
Does the show not trust us, its viewers, to follow along? I’m tempted to answer in the affirmative, to chalk up its stale explanations and rote camerawork to routine audience underestimation; after all, the “Narcos”-indebted, made-to-be-binged serials stuffing Netflix’s coffers today often don’t think highly enough of their audiences to present us with anything more than spoon-fed versions of any given universe.1 I’m not so sure that’s the case here, though. Frustratingly, on a few occasions, “Baby Reindeer” does appear capable of affecting filmmaking without the help of hand-holding narration. A chilling pan-out at the end of Episode Four, the sickening, curtain-blotted orange light hanging in an abuser’s foreboding apartment, and a wrenching moment of painful reconciliation between Donny and his father in the series finale are all examples of “Baby Reindeer”’s capacity to, at least in snippets, breathlessly land more complex emotional and cinematic maneuvers. The infrequency of such scenes, though, and that stubborn, unceasing dependence on Donny’s narration, lead me to believe the show’s issues are rooted not only in a lack of trust in its viewers but in a lack of faith in itself. In this way, the show’s trust issues appear to afflict those behind the camera just as they do the characters in front of it.
Which is a shame, because this is material ripe for understated contemplation, a thematic tour de force dipping into motifs of sexuality, self-loathing, dependency, abuse, generational trauma, and fulfillment. It’s full of ideas begging like warm and dimpled stones to be turned over, carefully and precisely, by a curious hand. In flashes, Gadd’s script conveys enough nuance (Episode 4, which strays from the Martha plot to focus on Donny’s spiraling relationship with Darrien, an acclaimed writer the protagonist puts on a lofty, dangerous pedestal, is a standout) to boost otherwise shaky execution. Overwhelmingly, though, the show’s stubborn insistence on over-explanation cannibalizes much of the ambiguous space where its weightier material might be more thoughtfully fleshed out. Practically, this has the effect of stunting character development, which in turn dulls the show’s emotional impact. I sense, for example, that Martha’s assault of Donny’s girlfriend Teri in Episode 3 (itself a confusingly filmed sequence) is intended to serve as a fork-in-the-road moment for Donny, one in which he’ll have to choose, finally, between living out his truth by defending his partner (Teri is a trans woman, and Donny is initially reluctant to show affection to her publicly) or continuing to pathetically acquiesce to Martha and his dry, homophobic mates at the pub. That’s, anyway, the choice the scene should elicit. Because the show so hastily introduces Teri in the prior episode, though, and provides her character such little space to breathe (outside a few sloppily portrayed mood swings which serve merely to push Donny’s arc forward), Martha’s assault leaves little emotional sting. By Episode 6, I was no closer to understanding Teri’s motivations for leaving Donny than I was in Episode 3, when she made the then-inexplicable decision to take him back.2 Ultimately, the show’s lack of investment in Teri means a more subtle and thorough exploration of Donny’s sexuality—arguably the most compelling aspect of the show—is lost.
None of this has slowed the global success of “Baby Reindeer,” which Netflix claims has attracted nearly 60 million viewers since its April release—a fact which might, sadly, actually be true because of its narration dependence rather than in spite of it. Not needing to think as much as a viewer certainly makes it easier to sink back into your chair, as I did, and let Netflix’s auto-play work its passive magic. I’d like to think, though, that the show’s popularity is mostly tied to its sneaky relatability, and more than any singular characteristic, Donny's irrationality is his most recognizable, and ultimately most human, trait.3 Viewers don’t need self-analytical lectures, armchair psychologist-style, from our protagonist to understand how Donny could force his boss to ban Martha from his workplace in the morning and then be aroused by her portrait at home on the very same night. Such gaps are less inconsistencies requiring detailed explanations than they are facts of the human experience, onscreen “contradictions” which any individual who reaches a not-so-advanced age understands are not contradictions at all.
The stakes are, of course, ratcheted up to extreme levels in “Baby Reindeer”—Donny’s confusion manifests in a set of truly appalling, gut-wrenching consequences. Most of us are unlikely to find ourselves down quite so bad. But as anyone who’s returned, tail between legs, to cower to an out-of-pocket, despotic boss on the lonely and vague glimmer of a distant promotion, or devoted countless dark hours to scrolling through texts and voicemails from an ex or a dead relative or a younger self can attest, Donny’s behavior is not nearly as outlandish as it appears. In about a half-dozen moments, “Baby Reindeer” deeply discomforted me in a way only really profound art can. My skin crawled with recognition during the show’s first episode as, after boosting what was destined to have been yet another floundering Donny stand-up gig, Martha affectionately leans into the comedian and, well, drapes herself over the allegedly non-consenting protagonist while the two share a bit of awkwardly euphemistic chitchat. Why did this interplay cut into my gut so deeply? Was I really recognizing myself in Donny? Surely not Martha? Both? Right? Huh? An onscreen minute later, Donny opens Facebook, torn over whether to accept a friend request from Martha. His cursor oscillates back and forth, mimicking the character’s indecision. I suspect most watching at home know which button he’ll click.
This is a glimmer of excellent filmmaking, of a show wrapped in knowing conversation with its audience. In spurts, “Baby Reindeer” seems to grasp the provocative power of such understated moments—that the dark circles, squealing laughter, and bloodshot eyes of its confounding characters are our own. The potential for brilliance is there. Which only makes it more lamentable that the show wields its authority too arbitrarily, too irresponsibly, to buoy a series which otherwise can’t seem to help but over-interpret itself out loud. A few scattered vignettes leave us merely imagining what a more comprehensively contemplative interpretation of Gadd’s story might have looked like onscreen. A minute after Donny clicks the inevitable button, a quick online search reveals Martha’s extensive criminal history. The protagonist’s distinctive eyes widen, his breath quickens. “I had a convicted stalker stalking me,” a panicked Donny repeats several times in an episode-closing (you guessed it) voiceover, slowly changing the intonation of the final syllable—”me”—with each reading to demonstrate his bubbling interest in Martha’s attention. It’s a clever dialogistic trick, but it carries almost no emotional weight. A simultaneous, muted observation of just Donny’s face, on the other hand—a face whose pain, mischief, desperation, fear, excitement, desire, dread, joy, and exhaustion are self-evident even in the dim glow of a late-night laptop—tells us all we need to know. For a show obsessed with obsession, I’m not sure “Baby Reindeer” realizes just how well we recognize that look.
I think it was Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald, back in the Grantland days, who observed that “Narcos”’ scripts shared uncanny resemblances to Wikipedia articles.
Nominally, it was because he began using his real name on a trans dating platform. I didn’t buy it.
In this way, I was reminded of “The Americans,” a much better and, it must be said, much less popular show with an ostensibly ludicrous plot whose emotional center revolves around a set of simple, universal questions on marriage and family. Mentioning “Baby Reindeer” and “The Americans” in the same breath is a massive compliment to the former, but this story has that kind of potential!