Netflix’s ‘Baby Reindeer’ review: One of the most brilliant and upsetting shows of 2024…
The show is at times painful to watch, but impossible to look away from!!
From its opening sequence, you could be forgiven for thinking Baby Reindeer was a comedy.
Set in a London police station, we watch as Donny Dunn (creator Richard Gadd, playing a version of himself), shuffles into reception to tell a disinterested officer he’s being stalked.
A woman Donny met in the pub where he works has been following him and sending him hundreds of emails a day.
When Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd) gives a woman named Martha (Jessica Gunning) a free cup of tea in the pub where he works, little does he know that this one simple act of kindness will soon transform into a nightmare that changes his life forever.
Making the move from Edinburgh Fringe to the West End and now Netflix, Baby Reindeer stars a fictionalised version of comedian Richard Gadd, who strikes up a flirty friendship with Martha (Jessica Gunning), a dishevelled, somewhat unhinged woman who claims to be a hotshot lawyer yet can’t afford a Diet Coke or cup of tea.
The struggling comic “instantly felt sorry for her”, Donny reveals via increasingly candid narration. But when the attention Martha gives him descends into full-blown stalking — including a total of 41,071 emails and 350 hours of voicemail — Donny is forced to reckon with past traumas and his culpability in what happens next.
No easy answers are given, and that’s a credit to Gadd, who not only wrote the show but also stars in it, revisiting the most difficult moments of his life with unflinching honesty and even self-condemnation.
And so does the narrative, most notably in the fourth episode, which breaks away from Martha’s escapades to reveal another harrowing, even darker chapter of Donny’s life from before.
Gadd is phenomenal, a consistently charming presence in every scene, and that’s true even in Donny’s most unlikeable moments. But don’t overlook Gunning, whose powerhouse performance as Martha will break your heart one minute and threaten to break your legs the next.
The real-life horror of it all is enhanced by unsettling close-ups and interstitial text cards that provide a glimpse of the frightening messages Donny receives from Martha daily, but these genre leanings never detract from the real people at the heart of this tragedy.
Baby Reindeer is often hard to watch.
Gadd’s series is by turns hilarious, harrowing, tense, uplifting, and upsetting. It’s difficult to categorise. Perhaps the only thread running throughout the seven episodes is just how uncomfortable things are.
The viewing experience is painful, for multiple reasons.
For the most part, it’s the show’s honesty. Donny’s standup performances are exactly what you’d expect from a struggling comedian: awkward to watch. He’s often met with silence, sometimes heckles.
More than once the person shouting from the audience is Martha herself, and the resulting exchanges — which, like the script as a whole, feel realistic — make you want to curl up into a ball.
What’s Baby Reindeer about?
Adapted from his one-man play of the same name, Gadd’s limited series is based on his own life. We first meet his protagonist, Donny, when he’s in something of a rut, working shifts in a London pub while struggling to make a name for himself as a standup comic.
Donny’s private life is more complicated than his professional one. He’s living with the mother of his ex-girlfriend and dating a trans woman, Teri (Nava Mau), a relationship he’s trying to keep secret due to his confusion about his sexuality.
Martha is a character that’s so well drawn, and so brilliantly acted by Gunning, that she’s difficult to look away from.
To make things worse, Donny randomly shows kindness to a stranger called Martha (Jessica Gunning), only for her to latch on to him in a way that goes from endearing to terrifying in the blink of an eye.
If Baby Reindeer teaches us anything at all, the truth is very rarely simple — and seldom as clean and satisfying as we would like it to be. Credit: Sam Hayson & David Opie.
By Pete Moore — Seamless Entertainment
