Shiva Baby (2021)
Directed by Emma Seligman; screenplay by Emma Seligman, adapted from her short of the same name; starring Rachel Sennott, Danny Deferrari and Molly Gordon.
4/5
Shiva Baby is a short (clocking in at 77 minutes), oftentimes hilarious ride, adapted from debut feature-director and screenwriter Emma Seligman’s short film of the same name, but don’t be fooled – it’s utterly nerve-shredding, likely far more so than most of the larger-budget horrors released this year. As indicated by the runtime, the film is marked by the typical indie sensibility of scaling things down in order to keep overheads low but I don’t think it could have otherwise worked as well as it does.
The film starts off by illustrating Danielle (Rachel Sennott), a young woman without a clear plan for the future who is still on her parents’ “payroll” as they describe, and her relationship to Max (Danny Deferrari) – a slightly older, well-off man who’ll become, in large part, the main source of Danielle’s anxiety throughout the rest of the runtime. She’s his sugar-baby, which is to say she maintains a relationship with him so long as he plies her with gifts and cash. It’s essentially sex work – which, as we’ll soon discover, is a bit of a departure from what Danielle’s parents think she means when she says she’s “babysitting.”
As the short opener ends, Danielle hurries off to attend the titular shiva (for those, like me, who don’t actually know what that is, it’s a Jewish ceremony of grieving) with her parents (Polly Draper and Fred Melamed). For whom the ceremony is taking place is a question to which Danielle doesn’t know the answer and is unlikely to receive one anytime soon from her eternally squabbling parents.
Also at the party will be many family friends, all eager to condescendingly point out Danielle’s history of “chubbiness” as compared to her current weight or enquire about her future beyond her undergraduate studies – a enquiry with a binary answer: law school or grad school.
Swimming amongst all these individuals, two will stand out. Maya (Molly Gordon), the seemingly more successful of the younger women at the party, with whom Danielle shares some kind of history, perhaps romantic, and the aforementioned Max, whose sudden appearance shatters Danielle’s illusion of a peaceful, if already slightly arduous, day out with her family.
What makes the thing work – what really glues it together – is its sense of humour. Far from cushioning the blows of the many social faux-pas Seligman masterfully conjures, the humour is born out of them, treading with the care and balance of a tight-rope walker that thin line between making you giggle nervously and wanting to shrivel up inside yourself.
In the moments it does stray, rather carefully I should add, into that territory of things becoming utterly overwhelming, the return to the humour also acts as a basepoint, a breath of air before being plunged back into the waters. As I say, it’s not so much about cushioning things, it’s more just a stark contrast to when things really get bad. And they do get bad. At its best, Shiva Baby is a suffocating experience.
Also helping the film stand out is a clever choice of location, likely somewhat enforced by its small scale, and the creative shooting style it adapts specifically to it.
It all takes place in a single house. It’s probably a large one, but you wouldn’t be able to tell for the forest of people inhabiting every room. Seligman refuses to hold on a wide for anything close to an extended period, choosing rather to stay connected to Danielle throughout with stifling close-ups. Frequently Danielle’s framed by prisons of nosy family friends, seeking only to escape and finally confront one of the various sources of her woes.
Most of the time, this is Max, who glides about the party with an ease inaccessible to Danielle, dancing just out of range of her attempts to pin him down on any of the new, salacious information she’s been learning about him from the others at the ceremony.
Max is a complicated figure throughout – not in himself, but in how Danielle sees him and interacts with him. For her, he’s a source of comfort in how she thinks she can play with his affections, how she has a kind of sexual power over him, but also a source of great shame, a secret to be hid – a secret that only grows in its darkness when Danielle discovers Max has indeed been hiding a spouse from her.
Rachel Sennott has her work cut out for her then. Most of how these interactions will work has to do with how she plays things, and though it’s a short 77 minutes, the film exclusively follows Danielle. By and large, she is a complete triumph. It’s a breakout success in my book, with Sennott lending Danielle the kind of fractured confidence that is completely needed here – that kind of defiant annoyance that betrays the vulnerability everyone around her inflicts upon her at all times.
It’s the same with most of the rest of the cast, Gordon’s Maya is cold and defensive at all times but always lets on a slight ambiguity regarding her feelings towards Danielle. Deferrari plays Max with a deceptive dangerousness that threatens to upend the whole occasion. And, the parents – Debbie and Joel – they’re magnificent. They play everything so straight that the cynical jibing they constantly give one another clashes perfectly with the sheer earnestness they show Danielle’s problems, for better or worse.
The one difficulty I have with the film is its repetitious use of certain scene structures, but it’s only really a minor gripe and one I feel may not be a mistake but a feature. As I’ve described, a large part of Danielle’s time is spent circling Max and Maya, unable to quite reach them. Often a scene will start out with Danielle entering a room, being trapped by well-meaning family friends, then progressively getting more and more overwhelmed, before she can escape but not before her mark slips just out of her grasp.
As I say, it’s nothing major, but once the structure is used, it feels a little redundant to keep repeating – though admittedly, it is a method of keeping things fresh with such a clearly limiting scenario for a feature film.
Fundamentally, though, in Shiva Baby, emphasis has been taken completely off the grand, dramatic motions of typical family drama and instead been heaped onto the uncomfortable quirks of the kind of small talk that nobody could ever really want to engage in. The whole thing seethes with nervous energy and tension until it’s taut to an overwhelming degree.
It’s that kind of film that manages to translate monotonous, daily specificity into hysterical observation and anxious complication (often the two being melded together) with an eye for painful detail. It’s the kind that translates the hyper-specific reality of life as a young, bisexual, Jewish woman into an exploration of insecurity, shame, and the vulnerability of not quite being accepted the way you are.
Watched on 12th June 2021