Baby Reindeer

You could call Baby Reindeer the Meet Cute Romance on steroids. Or a new chapter in Psychopathology in Everyday Life. I’ll settle for a triple-threat introduction to genius. Richard Gadd wrote this series, directed it and stars as the failed standup comedian who discovers himself through a Wacko Other, the humongous Martha. That’s about as impressive a triple-threat intro as Orson’s Charlie.

In the beginning. The haggard Donny is a bartender who buys a needy woman a drink. He is then alternately tickled and tormented by her stalking him. What keeps him from firmly and finally shucking her is his own guilt/shame/insecurity that derives from his having been drugged and raped by a screenwriter who’d encouraged his hopes to crack the biz.

The stalker’s intrusion into Donny’s life and mind torpedo his romance with the lovely and generous trans, Terri. It also queers his relationship with his ex, Keeley, and her mother, who has let Donny live in her house until Martha’s violence turns threratening. 

The last scene finds Donny alone and miserable in a bar, sans Visa. He killed his standup career by spending his gig on a humiliating confession. That makes him a brief celebrity. But he has nothing and no-one. The handsome young barkeep pays for Donny’s drink.

Now, there is an ambiguous ending for you. Will Donny revive his sanity, hopes and remnants of self-respect by invading the bartender’s life as Martha did his? Will the stalked turn stalker? 

Or is this revelation the necessary step for Donny finally to understand his nemesis Martha and to embrace her, perhaps even romantically, as radically kindred? After all, it was his first intercourse with Martha that finally freed him to make love to Terri. There’s guilt in them that hills but also maybe hope for a prospector?

When he/we learn what her sobriquet Baby Reindeer means we see she is as damaged by a loveless childhood as he was. This couple lives second generation trauma. Martha’s parents always fought. Donny’s vulgar bullying brute of a father was only hiding from his own childhood abuse by a priest. Father and son finally embrace over their respective rapes. Emerging from those traumas, neither the round lawyer Martha nor the skeletal comedian Donny have an easy path to self-knoweldge and self-acceptance. But they’re mad enough to try.

This dense, tense, shocking melodrama ultimately addresses an unexpected corner of our own humanity. It’s remarkable. And in both Jessica Gunning and Richard Gadd gives us two amazing new stars.