The Baby

I found this movie at random on Plex, and I was intrigued by the description. A social worker dealing with a weird family that has a 21 year old man living as a baby. I looked at descriptions and reviews, and they all went on about how surreal and weird the movie is, the kind of movie you couldn't make today, an unnerving psychological horror cult classic. I must've gotten a different movie. I've gotten weirder things free with my breakfast cereal. The story of The Baby is what I explained: a mom and her two grown daughters live together and take care of Baby, who has the body of a 21 year old man, but acts like a baby. Diapers, goo-goo-ga-ga, bottle feeding, the whole works. The social worker is unusually focused on this case, as she recently lost her husband in some kind of accident, so she seems to be using this unusual case as a way to avoid dealing with it. What let me down about The Baby is that, for all the talk of it being weird and unsettling, I didn't find it was weird ENOUGH. I expected a family that would make a carnival sideshow look like the Catholic College of Cardinals. If prolonged stares are supposed to deeply unsettling, sure, I guess they're weird, but I was expecting some serious dementia in the house, and instead, it's garden-variety abuse from Temu Bette Davis and her two daughters. I'm not making light of abuse; I'm just saying that for a movie whose reputation is built on making people squirm in their seats with how unsettling and bizarre it is, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is weirder than this. That lack of weirdness really undercuts the entire movie. The acting is fine, campy in the right way, and the growing contest of wills between the social worker and the mom plays out well, but The Baby moves along at such a languid pace, it needed something else to bring the glacially slow build to life. They mention a previous social worker who was assigned to the case and vanished, and it goes nowhere beyond that mention. Why not follow up on that? This movie needed something, anything, to get it to move, and instead, it wants to put all its eggs into two women fighting over control of this abused man, and the concept that he's a baby being enough to make it intriguing for 80ish minutes. It just isn't enough. It kept my attention, but only because I kept thinking "yeah, and?", waiting with anticipation that it would finally hit that upper gear and really blow me away, and it never did. Maybe I'm just too jaded, maybe the movie's sensibilities are out of date, or maybe I bought in to the hype too much. I don't know. I just know what I was sold was not what I bought.