Summary
-
Baby Reindeer
proves to be a terrifying, dark series despite its cuddly name, likened to a horror film by critics. - The perfect Rotten Tomatoes score and rising viewership numbers of
Baby Reindeer
signify its captivating and haunting impact. - Richard Gadd’s portrayal in
Baby Reindeer
, based on his own traumatic experience, shocks audiences with its raw intensity and realism.
Released on April 11, and without much previous fanfare, Netflix’s Baby Reindeer has proven to be quite a surprise. The seven-episode limited series, based on true events, follows aspiring Scottish comedian Donny (Richard Gadd), who is stalked by an older woman named Martha, whom he meets while he’s working at a pub in Camden. As Donny deals with Martha, he is forced to face a dark, buried trauma. The limited series, which doesn’t feature any big names, has achieved a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, with critics and audiences heralding it as moving, brave, complex, and dark.
Baby Reindeer, despite its cuddly name, is also pretty terrifying. The Guardian’s Rebecca Nicholson likens the series to a horror film, writing:
“‘Baby Reindeer’ is shot remarkably well. It looks like a horror film. There are uncomfortable closeups; unsettling, just-tilted angles; a disorientating creepiness built in to the aesthetic of it. It is frightening at times, horrifying at others. The pressure builds and builds.”
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Throughout its seven episodes, the series explores heavy themes, leading the Telegraph’s Benji Wilson to ask:
“The question with Baby Reindeer is: do you want to go there?”
The answer seems to be yes, given the film’s high rating and viewership numbers. Not only has Baby Reindeer accomplished the elusive perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, but it’s also rising in the Netflix streaming charts. According to the streamer, Baby Reindeer was the fifth most-watched series, with 10.4 million hours viewed (among 2.6 million viewers). 3 Body Problems is at the top of the list, with Unlocked: A Jail Experiment, The Gentlemen: Season 1, and Bad Dinosaurs: Season 1 trailing behind.
Baby Reindeer Shocks Viewers
As the Guardian’s review notes, Baby Reindeer is frightening. Donny’s kindness leads to terrifying consequences. After a visually distraught Martha walks into his pub, and he offers her a cup of tea on the house, and the series quickly descends into madness.
One aspect of the series that really seemed to shock audiences was that Gadd (who portrays Donny), is also the series’ writer, replaying a fictionalized version of his life on-screen. As Gadd told Netflix’s Tudum, revisiting that part of his life, which occured over a decade ago, was rough.
“It was difficult going back to these things. I felt like I needed to get it all out in one go because if I broke from it, I might break from the flow of it. I think it shocked a lot of people,” he shared. “A lot of people who worked on the show found it incredibly hard to read and do. I hadn’t admitted some of it to anyone.”
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Baby Reindeer is adapted from Gadd’s 2019 one-person Edinburgh Fringe Festival play of the same name. Martha is based on a woman who stalked him for over four years – sending him 41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemails, 744 tweets, 106 pages of letters, 46 Facebook messages, and gifts.
“I’d go to sleep at night and these voicemails — her words would bounce around my eyelids. I remember thinking, ‘God, if I was ever to speak about this onstage, I’d fire the words around. Put the voicemails in a big cacophony and fire it.’ That’s how the play was born,” Gadd told the publication.
Gadd wrote and created Baby Reindeer; he stars alongside Jessica Gunning, Nava Mau, and Tom Goodman-Hill.
Baby Reindeer
is available to stream on Netflix.
