“I just offered her a cup of tea.” This is how Donny responds to the policeman who asks him what he did to the woman who has been stalking him for months. How she haunts him that cup of tea, point of no return of the manic escalation of Marthathe stalker than as a harmless, albeit extravagant, customer of the pub where Donny works, becomes his nightmare, his executioner. “The truth? – Donny always explains to the same somewhat listless young agent, when he asks him how it all began – I felt sorry for him.” Martha, in fact, reminds us a bit of Annie Wilkes Misery must not die: a woman alone but with flashes of contagious joy (Donny himself will admit to having been conquered by Martha’s laughter), vulnerable, immersed in a world of her own made up of lies and fantasies, but who gradually will reveal a predatory and hallucinated nature. But as Martha’s behavior becomes more obsessive and Donny’s more self-destructive, the two find themselves trapped in a terrible downward spiral. This is the heart of Baby ReindeerNetflix series very little advertised but which, thanks to passionate word of mouth, has skyrocketed to the top number one of the most viewed in the world. Because it is an excellent story, with surprising plot twists, of a stalking incident where the victim, contrary to what usually happens, is a manbut behind its success is not only the brilliant writing, the perfect pacing and the enormous performances of Richard Gadd (Donny) and Jessica Gunning (Martha).
Baby Reindeer has, as they say in the jargon, “laundry” because it is based on a true story, experienced by Gadd himself, and about which he had already written one theathral show, Monkey See Monkey Do, which in 2017 won the Edinburgh Award for best comedy during the Edinburgh Fringe, Scotland, one of the largest theater festivals in the world. During the show, in which Martha exists only in the form of an empty stool, among other things Gadd projected onto a screen the screenshots of the many messages with which he was persecuted by a woman, whose name he never wanted to reveal, among the 2015 and 2018, when he was at the beginning of his acting career. Richard Gadd found himself in some ways haunted by his central theme show, Baby Reindeer. After six years of paranoia, 41,071 emails, 744 tweets and 350 hours of voicemails, decided to write a series (whose title derives from one of the nicknames that his persecutor had given him) to tell his experience as a victim of stalking by a middle-aged woman. But no, victim is not the right word, even if it is legally correct. It isn’t because Donny, who speaks on Richard’s behalf, comes down hard on himself, and until the fourth episode, which reveals his even more dramatic past (from here there will be some spoilers for the series on Baby Reindeer necessary to the story), he crudely blames himself, pointing out himself as a man looking for attention and more or less consciously flattered by the constant bombardment of compliments, allusions and then actual sexual advances from the woman. For a long time we witness the torment of a person who feels more and more crushed against the wall by the “love” hallucination, by the other’s conviction of being a couple (with all the pretensions and jealousies that for a pathological obsessive this entails), but which at the same time remains there, and not only for fear of a very violent explosion, but also for a sort of dependence on that dynamic which he fears but which he finally admits to, also thanks to another extraordinary character who is Teri (which we will not say anything about so as not to spoil the vision of those who have not yet immersed themselves in it), of having some obscure, deviant motive, need. In seven episodesGadd shows us without compromising how Martha’s obsession with Donny makes him grow in the whole range of terrifying sensations that stalking injects into the victim (from annoyance to panic, especially when loved ones are threatened), as well as a morbid fascination. And this last aspect is perhaps the least discussed nuance when talking about persecutory acts.
When Miles Ellingham by GQ America asked Gadd what he thought about the fact that he had, at a certain point, been accused of indulging his own stalker and if it was difficult to come to terms with one’s responsibilities, he replied: “I’ve heard that said to me, it’s true, and in many ways that’s one of the things that makes it different Baby Reindeer. We live in a time where everyone is trying to be perfect, but it’s interesting when someone throws their hands up and admits, “I’ve made mistakes.”. There was a 2019 version of the show that made me look good, but it would have rang false to me today. If you try to produce a work by lying, nothing really good will come of it.’ The other reason why Baby Reindeer turns out to be surprising is that his authors and authors (the directors are Weronika Tofilska and Josephine Bornebusch), as Diego Castelli writes on Serialminds “they construct the beginning of the series as a normal detective thriller, so light that it even allows for certain comedy elements and rhythms, only to then open the doors to an abyss that we hadn’t expected up until that moment, and which becomes particularly dizzying precisely because we assumed it couldn’t be that deep.” And here we come to the fourth episode. ATTENTION SPOILERS. Some of Donny’s reactions to what is happening to him may seem incomprehensible, at least until we are told about the painful experience he experienced some time ago: the meeting with a self-styled screenwriter, the deception and the sexual violence he suffered under the influence of drugs heavy. Finding the thoughtfulness of a stalker comforting is not madness, in this case. It becomes human desire: to be seen not for what you are, but for what you would like. Not a condition for everyone, but certainly for those who have already been mortified. “Who hurt you, little reindeer?” Martha asks the protagonist Donny. Because those who have been injured know how to recognize themselves. And the problem is that he also knows where to attack.
Baby Reindeer it is shot extraordinarily well. It seems a horror movie. There are uncomfortable close-ups; disturbing, slightly tilted angles; a disorienting anxiety inherent in its aesthetics. Sometimes it’s scary, other times terrifying, other times heartbreaking, especially when light, sweetness, makes its way through all that blackness. Gadd did not flatten the moral complexity of the work for television but went deeper into the gray areas. Among him numerous themesaddresses shame, cruelty, self-loathing, jokes, ego, pity, mental illness, guilt, loneliness, stalking control, desire, hard drugs, hope and despair . Gadd asks impossible, disturbing questions and nails them to the mast of trauma. While Baby Reindeer leads us to a careful reflection on slowly falling apart, we who watch do not need to have gone through the same experiences as Donny/Richard to understand what he has been through. It will be enough to remember that time we didn’t open our mouth because of the embarrassment we felt in a certain situation, or when we insulted someone else in order to be accepted, or when we knew we were doing something wrong, but we still didn’t stop. When we see shame we will all be able to recognize it, because we have felt it. But the problem is not to be aware of it, but rather to implode and disappear. We won’t tell you what will happen to Donny or Martha in the end, what we recommend is that you face their hallucinatory journey with open eyes, because it will leave you with something. Painful or perhaps liberating.
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