Baby Reindeer
Stand-up comedian Richard Gadd adapts his one-man show into a miniseries: the theme of stalking, declared from the outset, becomes a means for a harrowing self-reflection on a distorted identity that must be learned to live with. Exceptional quality: is it already the series of the year?
Boy meets girl, a classic tale; but this time it’s not about love, nor is it reminiscent of the nostalgic memory of a carriage ride. Donny Dunn is a Scottish aspiring comedian, thrown from his native Scotland into a London that offers no favors to anyone, especially those aspiring to success. Forced to make ends meet working in a pub in Camden, Donny meets Martha, a woman who is far from attractive, alone, and visibly depressed. Moved by pity, he offers her a cup of tea. This act of kindness will forever change Donny’s life: Martha, a repeat stalker, will pursue him for the next three years, sending him thousands of emails and SMS messages that are as obsessive as they are grotesquely ungrammatical, waiting for him outside his home and even appearing in the audience at his shows, interacting with him. A persecution that leaves Donny no escape, and – even more paradoxically – one that Donny seems almost unable to do without…
It is premature to declare Baby Reindeer the series of the year; it certainly is of the moment, judging by the word of mouth that, from the first weeks of streaming, has ensured it a continuously growing success in audience and critical acclaim. Not many were previously familiar with the eponymous and award-winning one-man theatrical show by Richard Gadd, which he has adapted for the small screen on Netflix, carving out a dual role as writer and protagonist (the direction is in the skilled hands of Weronika Tofilska and Josephine Bornebusch). Moreover, the show is drawn from an actual stalking incident that happened to the Scottish actor, suitably and openly fictionalized.
The premises are highly deceptive: the initial black comedy tone quickly gives way to storytelling that is anguished and merciless, harrowing and not at all mainstream. Stalking is the declared thematic field from the start, an effective topic to immediately captivate the viewer’s attention: but the unsettling omnipresence of Martha Scott in the life of Richard Gadd as actor/agent/character, as the driving force of the plot, incredibly shifts to the background after three episodes, to become a means to an end: self-reflection. Something is off in what Donny initially narrates, and there is a need to backtrack to explain his passivity in the face of stalking, his reluctance to report Martha and definitively close the case. At the center of it all is Richard/Donny himself, who pins his audience to their seats (both through fiction and in the fiction itself, with a memorable monologue in theater) by unraveling the traumas that led him to passively endure a similar situation.
Initially, one is struck by an open-minded character like Donny, who appears so resolved as to date transgender women and not be the least bit troubled by Martha’s physical appearance or her evident mythomania; rather, without reciprocating her feelings, he is perfectly capable of appreciating Martha for what she can offer in terms of attention. In reality, none of what we see stems genuinely from Donny, but is induced by a past of abuse and a subsequent need for any form of affirmation, regardless of who is in front of him. And this leads the young man to experiment with sexual experiences of any kind, in a disordered, disjointed, desperate manner.
The horror that creeps into the narrative is that of no longer facing a love story (or a search for love), but a lost identity because it has been radically changed, with which one must learn to live. And speaking again is the openly bisexual Richard Gadd, who brings his dramatic beginnings in the world of stand-up comedy into play, a merciless world where eliciting laughter from the audience is an almost titanic endeavor, often the result of circumstances.
The root of the evil is here, in the disillusionment and sexual abuse that originates the trauma. And it is the climax of a process of self-narration that, perhaps, is the main reason for the series’ success, even though the contents may be distant from the audience in tone and substance: now contemporary narrative, thanks to the advent of social media and the possibility to create one’s own independent storytelling, is rigorously declined in the first person. Sharing one’s content, or seemingly talking about a collective event only to converge the discussion on oneself and one’s physiological need for attention (even virtual), is perhaps the driver of most posts on Facebook, X, and Instagram?
Gadd moves in the exact same way, as is right for a production of our times, and obtains from his diverse and unprepared audience the only thing he can: universal empathy. Add to all this the brief duration of the episodes, half an hour each, currently the best and most consumable format in the vast sea of television productions.
Looking back (though doing so beforehand, at the drawing board, is anything but simple…), the operation of Baby Reindeer is truly successful, as well as of the highest technical quality. It seeks empathy but does not beg for it, knows how to convince without resorting to pity, and does not make its protagonist a victim of the world but a part of it: victims and perpetrators in turn, as taught by the experience with Martha, culminating in a memorable finale where Donny, after voluntarily returning to the home of the true cause of all his problems, symbolically takes Martha’s place, and receives the empathy mixed with pity that he had generously extended at the beginning of the story. We are alone, Gadd says. And interchangeable, in the pain and experiences that have traumatized us individually only to end up alone at a bar counter. Very sad. And very true.
Gianluigi Ceccarelli
Cinematografo, May 6, 2024
The series Baby Reindeer consists of seven episodes, which all simultaneously premiered on Netflix on 11 April 2024.
