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Baby Reindeer (2024)

2024 · Biography,Comedy,Drama · dramatized-true-crime, contemporary-realistic

Baby Reindeer poster

Baby Reindeer is a semi-autobiographical UK limited series in which Richard Gadd plays a failing stand-up comedian whose act of small kindness toward a lonely woman spirals into a years-long stalking ordeal that forces him to confront his own trauma, self-loathing, and complicity. Tagged as dark comedy, it is in practice a harrowing psychological character study — almost unbearably raw in places, particularly around Episode 4 — that uses Gadd's real-life experience to illuminate the paralyzing interior logic of victimhood, shame, and self-destruction. Performances by Gadd and Jessica Gunning are universally cited as exceptional. The show is brief, intense, and impossible to shake.

From the reviewers

his eyes, mouth and jaw move constantly from a place of fear that is set across his scraggly bearded, hollow face, both handsome and homely. Every thought, every emotion plays across his mask in direct opposition of the poker face he imagines hides the true Donny.
Gunning brilliantly uses her face to convey elation, naughtiness, rage, pain and emotional blankness with an ease of facility equal to Gadd's Donny. Indeed, the two make an uncomfortably powerful match in Baby Reindeer.
It almost lulls you into thinking you're watching a comedy drama, and there are definitely several funny elements, as it moves on however, it takes you to some very dark places
This level of self-loathing is addictive and isn't meant to be pretty or funny. It isn't. It cannot be. It's made manifest through the jokes that die before they're emitted from his lips, from the juvenile props that fail to offer any comic relief from the torment.
It's a brutally honest masterpiece about two very broken individuals, one who is destructive to others and one who is hell bent on self distrusting and how they form a bizarre and thoroughly toxic connection.

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