Netflix’s Baby Reindeer is standout, must-watch TV

Baby Reindeer ★★★★½

“Do you ever want to unzip people and climb inside them?”

That’s one of the disconcerting remarks – as opposed to delusional or unhinged or violent – that Martha Scott (Jessica Gunning) says to Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd, the show’s creator) early on in this unflinching series. Donny’s behind the bar in a London pub, Martha’s a lonely patron, and when he gives her a free cup of tea she obsessively invades his life. Flirting, praising, making ludicrous claims, and haranguing him – Martha is his stalker.

Richard Gadd plays a bartender whose life is invaded by an obsessive, lonely patron in Baby Reindeer, which is based on his one-man show of the same name.Credit: Netflix

Baby Reindeer – Martha’s nickname for Donny – is a seven-part adaptation of Gadd’s acclaimed 2019 solo stage performance of the same name. A horror story couched in the recesses of comedy, it’s a painful, compelling viewing experience. The line between wanting to know what happens and wanting to back away is thin and dangerously sharp; Gadd never settles for anything less. It’s rated R, based on closely documented events in Gadd’s life, and takes up the baton forged by Michaela Coel’s magisterial I May Destroy You.

A breakthrough success more scything than stunning, the show feels lived in and thoroughly translated from stage to screen. The camera moves imperceptibly in close-ups, adding an unnerving sensation to wound-tight emotions, while the use of lighting and sound leaps and drops to convey Donny’s interior panic. That he’s an aspiring comedian only adds to the unease – every performance of Donny’s flailing material feels like another turn of the screw.

Richard Gadd and Jessica Gunning in a scene from Baby Reindeer.Credit: Ed Miller/Netflix

As forensic and uncomfortable as Martha’s pursuit of Donny is, and Gunning is remarkable as a mentally ill woman who goes from moments of wisdom to volcanic rage, Baby Reindeer is so much more than a Fatal Attraction update because of Gadd’s unrelenting self-examination; it’s no exaggeration when Donny, near breaking point, calls himself “an open wound”. Donny doesn’t just have poor judgment, there’s a part of him that wants Martha ruining his life, that needs it.

That’s something Teri (Nava Mau), a trans woman Donny dates via his own deceptions, tells him, and as the story spreads beyond Martha’s bombardment and Donny’s haphazard contact with the police, the focus becomes Donny’s reckoning with himself. Trauma is a mainstay television topic nowadays, but it’s intimately dissected here. The fourth episode, a flashback to a series of sexual assaults from a supposed friend and collaborator, is both shattering and illustrative.

There might be one too many false dawns in this narrative, but the unheralded Baby Reindeer is still easily one of the best new series of the year so far. It’s wrenching, but somehow still has consolatory moments of great humour, and by the end, Gadd has completely unzipped himself. It’s worth climbing inside.

Baby Reindeer streams on Netflix.

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