Baby Ruby

Baby Ruby is an arthouse drama about postpartum depression,
I went into it thinking that perhaps it would be more than that, 
that it would use postpartum depression as a backdrop to telling a larger story but this is not the case. I feel to actually get anything from the film you have to view it with the understanding that the intent of the filmmaker was not to tell a story but to present the audience with the very real traumatic experience that some women endure as a result of giving birth.

The horror present in this film is the horror of pregnancy. 
A thing that is overlooked by our society as we're conditioned to view pregnancy as a miraculous and beautiful event. The reality is far from that when you consider what a woman must go through physically in order to give birth.

The film shows the new mothers difficulty in accepting the changes in her body which it depicts in graphic detail almost to the point of body horror when she looks at her genitals for the first time and literally cries at the sight of them. Her body feels alien to her as if it is not her own anymore, an experience I imagine many women go through.

We follow Jo played by Noemie Merlant as she spirals deeper into psychosis, depression and paranoia. There are hints throughout that perhaps her delusions are rooted in reality but it is made inexplicably clear that they are in fact symptoms of her condition. It's not a film I can say that I enjoyed watching at all but I think it's informative and relatively well acted. I was aware of what postpartum depression was but I didn't realise quite how much psychological distress it could cause.

I assumed perhaps naively that it was purely to do with feelings of guilt and depression around the responsibility of having a child, I didn't realise that women could experience literal psychotic episodes as the result of having kids. I feel I should mention in closing that ultimately this film is about overcoming this very sensitive issue and that it stresses the necessity for women to be able to openly discuss this subject in order to eventually overcome it. 

It's not going to get a recommendation from me 
because I didn't enjoy it at all but that doesn't mean in any way shape or form that it is an inherently bad film, it gets a three out of ten from me because basically I personally did not enjoy it but I get what it was going for.