Review of the series Baby Reindeer

The new Netflix hit is the autobiographical miniseries Baby Reindeer, created by Scottish stand-up comedian Richard Gadd, based on his own one-man show, which in turn reveals the author's reflections on his experience of sexual abuse by a man, long-term harassment and persecution by a woman, and eventual realization of his bisexuality. Behind the black comedy thriller that Baby Reindeer initially appears to be, a very sad and very touching drama about lonely little people who mercilessly despise themselves and even hate them for being outsiders gradually unfolds.

Baby Reindeer can be called a black reflection of American sitcoms. It operates with few locations and a limited range of characters. A lot of dialogues and monologues are quotes from real emails sent by the stalker to the protagonist (in the series, Richard Gadd plays himself and goes by the name Donny Dunn, and the unnamed stalker is called Martha). Most of the scenes take place in apartments, a bar, and on a stage where Donny Dunn, a thirty-year-old failed bartender who moved from Edinburgh to London and lives in his ex-girlfriend's mother's house because he can't afford the rent in London, tries in vain to become a stand-up and experiences epic failures and shame every time because the audience doesn't laugh at all.

The story is told in the first person and resembles a confession in a confessional, a stand-up performance, a statement in a police station, and a session with a psychotherapist. From the moment it all started (when a strange, elderly, overweight woman walked into a bar in tears and said she didn't have money for even a cup of tea, and the sympathetic bartender took pity on her and bought her a drink) to the moment the story of this stalking-type story ends, the author-hero "undresses" in front of the audience at least seven times, once in each of the seven episodes. These "undresses" are full of honesty and embarrassment. That is, it's not the kind of undressing you do during a striptease. It's not even like a doctor's appointment. It's more like being completely naked in the middle of a crowded street.

At least three times, Richard Gadd not only "undresses" in front of us, but loses his mental virginity. When he admits that no one laughed at his jokes during stand-up performances, but he still came to perform again and again and again to feel shame and humiliation. When he admits that he was raped by a man, but after that he came to see that man again and again and again... And when he admits that he actually needed and even liked Marta's advances, and that he even masturbated to Marta's photo when he wasn't having sex with his transgender partner.

Baby Reindeer can be called a combination of the chamber psychological thriller Misery based on the novel by Stephen King and the British autobiographical miniseries I May Destroy You by Michaela Cole. King, who placed his alter ego in the image of a writer who falls victim to the unhealthy love of his admirer, invented the story of Misery, although not without reason (and by the way, the master of horror called The Stag "the best he had ever seen"). And the screenwriter-actress Michaela Coel recounted her own experience of experiencing and comprehending sexual violence almost without any fiction, and, like Richard Gadd, portrayed herself on the screen.

If Misery is a very cinematic thriller that uses genre conventions and a clear division between victim and maniac (or rather maniac), The Deer is psychologically much deeper and more contradictory and does not stigmatize its characters. Even when Marta seems to be a completely deranged person, not just an eccentric, but an abnormally sociable sociopath, a frighteningly smiling and seriously aggressive racist-homophobic monster..., we still see Marta as a real person, not an evil antagonist.

Of course, we never see her soul naked. Only partially, just a little bit. Because this is a story told through the eyes of Richard Hudd, and it is an uncompromisingly honest story, so if the author hasn't fully solved Martha's mystery for himself, he doesn't pretend to the audience that he has. Instead, he seems to reveal everything about himself without any filters. And this is an unprecedented meta-frankness and an unprecedented lack of hypocrisy and pragmatism on the screen, which is not about masochism, but about the fact that we are ready to physically and morally self-destruct for a little bit of attention.