Baby Reindeer vs. the algorithm
the true crime that's worth your time
[CW: depictions of sexual assault]
The crime
Stalking; rape.
The story
Baby Reindeer apparently hit Netflix a couple weeks ago, and the Netflix algorithm did try to recommend it to me…but the Netflix algo tries to recommend a lot of rando shit I'll never watch, because thanks to the broad range of content I have to screen for various podcasts, I'd get more accurate predictions from a Magic 8-Ball filled with Fireball, so I ignored the rec.
read more at Best Evidence.fyi
My esteemed colleague Tara Ariano's endorsement: different story. She described Baby Reindeer as a Venn of our critical interests – "comic turned the story of getting stalked into a play, and now a series" – and mentioned the comparatively short episodes, so I gave it a look.
As usual, listening to T-Bone is the smart play; the show is outstanding. I went in thinking I'd just watch a few, but finished the series in an afternoon, and I too recommend it. It's not traditional true crime (although that hasn't stopped internet detectives from trying to identify and cancel the real-life perpetrators – to the point where creator and star Richard Gadd had to get on social and tell people 1) it's art and 2) knock it off)...but at the same time, it's one of the truest-feeling accounts of surviving crime I've seen.
Gadd, a charismatic and committed performer, has obviously had years to contemplate and mediate the story, and while not every property years in the evolving is expertly structured and paced, Baby Reindeer is very finely honed in that regard. Even uncomfortable scenes last exactly long enough and don't punish the viewer pointlessly. It's shot evocatively as well; it's not showy about it, but the way each scene is lit and framed helps to suggest apprehension, anhedonia, or safe harbor. The fourth episode is particularly powerful in that regard: as Darrien's (Tom Goodman-Hill) grooming and manipulation ramp up, the lighting and camera angles create a queasy immersive claustrophobia (somewhat reminiscent of Trainspotting, which I doubt is a coincidence), Darrien's literal looming multiplying into a figurative looming over Gadd's Donny, and over the audience.
The acting is fantastic across the board. (Mark Lewis Jones as Donny's blustery father gets a gorgeously affecting moment towards the end, a ripple of the lower lip that's going to stay with me.) Goodman-Hill is just right as Darrien, letting us see his gelid calculations; we have all known that guy. And we've all known a Martha, too, and Jessica Gunning understands how to convey that the Marthas of the world are never 100 percent "off," or not 100 percent of the time. After a decades-long career online, I well know the parasocial "relationship" that isn't, how easily "awkward" can blow fatally off course, etc., and one of the remarkable things about Baby Reindeer is how it renders that idea without also rendering a value judgment. People get broken, and reassembled poorly, if at all.
But the most remarkable thing about the show is its depiction of the complexity of trauma and post-trauma behaviors. We don't "get over" things, healing isn't a straight line, and we know that intellectually, but we almost never see it in scripted art, possibly because the purpose of scripted art is often to draw the lines real life resists. Donny zig-zags from feeling to feeling, functional enough, able to see what's going on with himself but unable to manage it. He knows he should tell his girlfriend Teri (Nava Mau, commanding the screen every second she's on it) why Martha is both her own trauma and a trigger for another one; Teri, a trans woman and a therapist, is probably the best possible navigator on the "journey to self" he could find. He can't do it. He can't resist engaging with Martha. He can't stop despising himself long enough to act in his own self-interest. It's maddening, because you want Donny to agree with you that he deserves some peace – but the way the series makes room for this imperfect victim without trying to fix or saint him is heartening at the same time.
While we do see moments of release and redemption, there isn't a happy ending, or a reunion, or vengeance. There's ambiguity, and tears, and it's unclear how things might turn out for Donny when the credits roll. It's not cinematic – ironically, I guess, given how well crafted the compassionate but unsentimental portrayal of survival in Baby Reindeer. We don't get to see that it all turned out okay, but the acknowledgment that it might not, that sometimes it's like this and that this is difficult and alienating, is something rare.
My esteemed colleague Alan Sepinwall put it this way in Rolling Stone:
This is a true story, but it is not a documentary, nor a true-crime saga meant to inspire a public lynching of either of his tormentors. It is Gadd doing what so many artists have done for millennia: telling a fictionalized account of a true thing because he finds it interesting, and/or because turning it into material is a way of working through his complicated feelings about it.
As I've said many times over the years, a fictionalized account of a crime can sometimes get at the "true" in ways a documentary can't – and as Sepinwall also said, "On that level, Baby Reindeer is tremendous.” — SDB