Babystar

Watched at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

Family/child influencers have become quite the controversial discussions due to the toxic and extremely immoral situations and moments that has happened behind the scenes. What director Joscha Bongard offers is a critique on the societal world of capitalism, greed, exploitation, and the negative effects of family/child influencers.

Throughout, the camerawork, production designs, and sound designs are excellent. Using colorful sets, placed cameras and designs to establish the rich, money, and somewhat isolated feeling within the main characters and others surrounded. The performances are pretty good, especially Maja Bons as Bons captures the loneliness, sadness, and tense personalities of it's main role.

The narrative does a solid work on exploring it's purpose and subject. Although, due to some of Bongard's direction being a little unbalanced, the narrative, at times, doesn't fully take advantage of it's concept as it could have been. Some of the concepts and themes explored didn't feel fully explored, fulfilled, or developed enough as it could have been, and this causes some of the characters to not be fully emotionally nor engaging to connect with as Bongard would have wanted.

Alongside with some decent musical scores, the dialogue was a bit off-putting, whether it was intentional, it felt slightly stilled. Including certain pacing moments that could have been improved.

Overall, I'm surprised stories about family/child influencers haven't been made much despite how popular they have been in the recent digital ages. I do appreciate Bongard's attempt as this is definitely an ambitious movie and a subject that definitely needs to be called out. However, it could have been better.