SummaryStruggling comedian Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd) doesn't report his stalker Martha (Jessica Gunning) right away in the dramedy series based on Gadd's one-man play about his own experience with a stalker.
SummaryStruggling comedian Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd) doesn't report his stalker Martha (Jessica Gunning) right away in the dramedy series based on Gadd's one-man play about his own experience with a stalker.
Gunning’s performance is a large part of what makes the show the horrifying and addictively compelling thing it is. Particularly haunting is her squeal-like laugh, which perfectly encompasses the duality of Martha’s innocence and unhinged brutality. This, coupled with Gadd’s devastating portrayal of a man both traumatized by and dependent on his abusers’ approval and attention, make for a thorny but nuanced interrogation of trauma, power, and empathy.
One of the show's greatest strengths is how it's able to balance such challenging subject matter with inspired flashes of humour. .... This is an early contender for show of 2024.
“Baby Reindeer” might sometimes be a difficult, exhausting watch. Still, the unforeseen, often wounding journey is nonetheless unbelievably gripping in its confrontational exploration of all the destructive, harmful things we do in the name of self-approbation, even if it’s as simple as seeking a gratifying laugh. Gadd’s courageous, unflinching decision to reexamine the suffering of this excruciating time and ferociously interrogate it, his shame, guilt, remorse, and self-reproach, is essential and ultimately healing stuff.
That Baby Reindeer is able to get from its familiar premiere to this place of emotional honesty and profound insight, while bringing such a large audience along for the ride, is remarkable.
Intense and compelling. .... There is nothing pat or simplistic in the way Gadd lays it all out across seven half-hour episodes, and, most interestingly, there is very little self-righteousness afoot.
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.