Baby Reindeer, review: Richard Gadd’s superb stage show makes for gruelling, if compelling TV
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Like Patrick Melrose in Edward St Aubyn’s remarkable series of novels, there is something thrilling in watching a man self-combust. Baby Reindeer (Netflix), a seven-part drama by Richard Gadd, is one long psychological death spiral, but it is oddly compelling to see Gadd’s real-life story play out.
Based on his award-winning Edinburgh Fringe one-man play, Baby Reindeer follows struggling comedian Donny Dunn’s (Gadd) warped relationship with his female stalker, Martha (Jessica Gunning). She walks into the pub at which he’s been working while trying to make it as a comedian, and she’s so clearly unhinged that she might as well set off the wacko klaxon.
Baby Reindeer (the title comes from her nickname for Donny) attempts to answer the most glaring question – why would a sane man have anything to do with a woman whom his very first Google search reveals to be a “Deranged Lawyer Struck Off for Stalking”? – with a detailed, masochistic character study.
Donny, later episodes reveal, is addicted to any affirmation he can get, courtesy of a deeply buried earlier trauma. (Episode five, which is harrowing and explicit, takes you through every beat.) Even as he knows he should cut the rope with Martha, he can’t help but put himself up for more punishment.
It makes for a difficult watch. While Gunning is stunning as Martha (augmenting her reputation as a top comic actress with a performance that should see her go full Olivia Colman), we do spend a lot of time with Gadd staring blankly into camera. His life unravels on a loop, with one bad choice quickly following another and every rock bottom a false floor. The honesty is laudable – this is a seven-part dark night of the soul – but as drama it lags. The over-reliance of voiceover also betrays Baby Reindeer’s stage roots. On screen you can show more and tell less, yet though a great deal of Baby Reindeer is filmed in close-up, it still relies on a narrator to do the emotional legwork.
But then the emotions it is trying to convey are complex. Donny has a need for attention that has come from abuse. It’s made him, as he says at one point, “a sticking plaster for life’s weirdos”. It’s also made him introspective to the point of narcissism – and all of these contradictory impulses he recognises, concedes and loathes.
It is, in other words, public therapy. The question with Baby Reindeer is: do you want to go there? It’s a complex, at times self-defeating portrait of a mind eating itself alive. It’s not fun and it’s not meant to be – that’s admirable as art, perhaps less so as entertainment.
Baby Reindeer is on Netflix now
