Nasty Baby

This film really had an impact on me. I'm not sure this was in the way the filmmakers intended though, as it was a very mixed experience.

I was immediately drawn in by the "indy" vibe, if that's what you call it. The naturalistic acting was appealing and seemed, for the most part, to ring true. The way the actors moved and conversed was convicing, so perhaps it was improvised to an extent? I thought the two main male actors did exceptionally well and I'd be curious to see them in other work. (Obviously I know Kristen Wiig already, and she is so good!) I liked the tone that was set and I felt more and more connected to the characters and story as it went along. But, as others have mentioned, when the film takes an abrupt turn, I just stopped believing it. Not the premise of this event or how it is dealt with initially, or how it is shown (I appreciate the graphic portrayal of it) but how the challenge is dealt with afterwards, and everything that follows, including the closing credits. The realism stopped there, and I felt ripped off and pissed off. It was like they took two completely different plots and mashed them together, and I really want to know how things would have turned out without the abrupt turn. I would like to understand the whys and hows of the filmmaker's decisions. Was there a message? Did the filmmaker intend to upset his audience? What was the point of this whole thing? And, that said, I still think it's a good piece of film-making, which perhaps explains why I can't just let this go and dismiss this as a piece of crap.

Freddy (Sebastián Silva) and Mo (Tunde Adebimpe) are a gay couple in NYC. They're trying to have a baby with friend Polly (Kristen Wiig). Freddy discovers that he has low sperm count. Mo is reluctant to contribute. Freddy is a performing artist making a short of adults acting like babies. The group gets harassed by local homophobic unstable Bishop (Reg E. Cathey).

This is a rambling indie at first. The starts as a low-budget mumbling gay lifestyle artsy New York indie. It sprinkles in some darker tones and then it takes a completely different dark turn. It's intriguing although it doesn't completely work.

Wow. Just... wow. I don't think I've seen more than five films in my life that take such an unpredictable, wild turn and tonal shift like this did. I had no idea what it was about, and the first hour or so was great on itself. Engaging characters, well-acted, very humane in its storytelling. What prompted the filmmakers to do what they did? Well, it helps to bring up questions of what the "everyday" person would do in that scenario. Do I buy it? Well, I don't "not buy it". I can definitely say that I didn't dislike its execution. One doesn't really know what they would do in such a scenario. Of course, everyone would like to say "I would have done the right thing!", but we just don't know. This is the troubling question that this film wants us to answer, and honestly, I think it did an amazing job of it. In real life, everything is normal, everyone can be normal... until it's not. What DOES happen when the "stuff hits the fan"? What WOULD we do? There are many different ways that the film could've posed these questions, and sure enough many other films that I've seen have posed them in different ways, but I think the unorthodox unpredictability of this really hits those points home. I think that first normal hour is needed for this reason, and why no one should read anything about this film going into it. I can totally see why it may not have worked for so many people, but I think the execution was on point. For better or worse, the filmmakers took a huge, giant risk here (like, I cannot stress enough how HUGE that risk was), and they didn't want this film to be forgotten lightly. For my money, I left it feeling like it had made me think about a lot of different things, along with being a highly intriguing, engaging film.

Pretty lousy for the most part, though it does arrive at a compelling (if not original) conclusion. Director Sebastian Silva stars along with Tunde Adebimpe as a gay couple in New York City who are thinking about having a baby with their best friend, Kristen Wiig. Not much really happens plotwise for the first hour or so, though a conflict arises between the trio and a mentally unhinged, homophobic man who lives in their neighborhood (Reg E. Cathey). He often follows Wiig around in a threatening manner, and likes to throw homophobic slurs at Silva and Adebimpe as they walk down the street. Alia Shawkat (who co-produced! How desperate do you have to be to hit Alia Shawkat up for money?) and Mark Margolis also co-star.

Chilean director Sebastián Silva's Sundance premiered sixth feature NASTY BABY is an oddity in queer cinema, it ostensibly starts to tackle with a topical issue of gay couples, after homosexuality has been reckoned more or less as a normalcy in America, - parenthood, but rounds off with a shark-jumping bang. Freddy (director Silva himself) is an European immigrant, from Spain, one divines, he is a performance artist lives in New York with his black boyfriend Mo (Adebimpe, leading singer from TV on the Radio). Freddy and his bestie Polly (Wiig) are both broody: Freddy is caught up in his new project named "Nasty Baby" which involves adults imitating baby behaviours, it is absolutely nonsensical both on paper and in its eventual form, while Polly, at one point is joked by Freddy as a"semen vampire", she is not young anymore, so timing is also crucial for her whether she could ever become a mother. Naturally, they decide to having a baby together, only to their dismay that Freddy's sperm count is too low. So Freddy is egged to persuade Mo as the sperm donor, and the latter eventually caves in.

Meanwhile, a mentally impaired vagrant Bishop (Cathey) lives nearby begins to wrack the trio firstly by leaf-blowing in every early morning across the street of Freddy and Mo's apartment, then physically pestering Polly several times and constantly hurling homophobic abuse at them, anyway he is cuckoo, and Silva ascertains that the aversion to Bishop is plain vicarious.

Time goes by until a mood-shifting third act happens on the day when Polly phones Freddy that she is not pregnant with Mo's semen whereas the truth is otherwise, she only wants to give him a surprise later to cheer him up after knowing Freddy's Nasty Baby is cold-shouldered by the gallery owner initially shows interest but backtracks. On his way to his apartment, a tetchy and smouldering Freddy encounters Bishop again, and this time, there will be blood! The film changes its gear bluntly from a blanched mumblecore to a noirish thriller saturated with consternation and fumbles (a hallmark deer-in-the-headlight will arrive later as an over-obvious metaphor). It is a wayward move notwithstanding, but what Silva brings home to audience is the elemental homicidal urge resides in those carefree hipsters, whom we are half-heartedly rooting for until that crunch. The trio is going to become parents of a mixed race baby, but a callous truth is that not only they have no instinct to save one when they can, they also unanimously chooses the other way around, on a deceitful ground that man is a scourge, despicable and expendable, yet, he is still an egalitarian human being, when bringing a new life into this world and extinguishing an old one (assumably with the same skin color) has been juxtaposed in that fashion, it electrifies viewers to jump on that cynical old question: how can we keep our inner demon at bay and raise a child free of such contamination? That's my takeaway of this unorthodox indie fare when being steeped in the catchy closing-credits anthem: Ida Corr and Fedde Le Grand's LET ME THINK ABOUT IT. There is some food for thought left, but also one cannot help feeling being short-changed.