Bess Wohl’s Baby Ruby tells the story of Jo, a successful lifestyle entrepreneur who is happily pregnant, awaiting the arrival of her first child. Sounds blissful, but you know we wouldn’t be telling you about it here if that were the case! Soon after Jo welcomes baby Ruby home, something starts to feel off– in spite of assurances all around that what she’s feeling is “perfectly normal.” Joe begins to wonder whether there is something wrong with her or her baby. Why are the seemingly perfect neighborhood moms so desperate to befriend her? As Jo fights to protect her family, she enters a nightmare where everyone is a threat and nothing is what it seems. At last, she must confront the truth of her own darkness and contend with the ultimate human sacrifice: the one mothers make for their children.
Starring Noémie Merlant (Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, TÁR) and Kit Harington (Game of Thrones), Baby Ruby came about after writer/director Bess Wohl became a first-time mother herself. Wohl says, “I tried to make sense of my postpartum experience and to find language to speak about it with others. I wanted to communicate that I loved my daughter desperately, yet in spite of that– or maybe because of it– she sometimes ignited in me an almost unbearable sense of powerlessness and rage.”
As a way of understanding her own experience, Wohl embarked on this cathartic creation, “I wanted to talk honestly about an experience that was, quite literally, both the best and the worst thing that I’d ever lived through. I wanted to understand my own experience within the context of the fact that support for new mothers– and mothers in general– is nearly non-existent in the United States. Indeed, maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are the highest in the developed world, and this tragedy will no doubt only be exacerbated by our Supreme Court’s recent elimination of the fundamental right to abortion. I didn’t know how to have a conversation big enough to encompass all of this, to fully describe everything I felt and saw and lived, and so I made a film.” Take a sneak peek at this exclusive Baby Ruby clip below.
Baby Ruby is in select theaters and available on VOD now. Check out the official trailer here.
