Baby Reindeer Does Something Remarkable
In the first three episodes of the Netflix drama Baby Reindeer, starring its creator and writer Richard Gadd, Gadd’s character, Donny Dunn, kind of grates on you. He’s an alternative comedian, heavy on the goofy props, who’s still waiting on his big break while working behind the bar at a London pub. When Martha (Jessica Gunning), a disheveled, tearful older woman, sidles up to the bar one day, “I felt sorry for her,” Donny says in voice-over. “That’s the first feeling I felt. It’s a patronizing, arrogant feeling, feeling sorry for someone you’ve just laid eyes on, but I did. I felt sorry for her.” So Donny gives poor Martha a free cup of tea. This small act of kindness ignites her obsessions; she starts visiting Donny daily at the pub, making up stories about an illustrious law career and sending him hundreds of bizarre stream-of-consciousness emails. Turns out this isn’t Martha’s first rodeo: She’s been arrested and imprisoned for stalking before.
So why does Donny indulge her, even flirt with her? Martha shows up to his pub in new outfits and makeup styles “like a kid playing dress-up,” clearly attempting to seduce him. Pity isn’t Donny’s sole motivation in engaging anymore; he admits to becoming obsessed with making Martha laugh, doing “everything I could to eke it out of her.” When his co-workers at the pub poke fun at his new “girlfriend,” Donny indulges them too, tossing out a sex joke at Martha’s expense right in front of her. Even though Martha’s constantly overstepping boundaries and embarrassing herself, she has a certain zany Scottish charm, and it’s Donny (also Scottish) in these earlier episodes who comes across as the less likable half of their dysfunctional duo— especially once he starts dating a trans woman named Teri (breakout star Nava Mau) and, overcome with shame, abandons her on the tube rather than kiss her in public.
Why doesn’t Donny report the extent of Martha’s antisocial, even violent behavior? She follows him home at night, gropes him, and attacks Teri both physically and verbally with transphobic, racist outbursts. In the show’s very first scene, Donny goes to the police, yet he fails to either mention that Martha’s a convicted stalker or disclose her most threatening behavior. The unconvinced officer asks him what we’re all thinking: Why, after six months, is he only just reporting Martha now? It’s all enormously frustrating to watch unfold, as is much of Donny’s cringey comedy. What is this guy’s deal? Why is he openly courting affection from a clearly unwell person who confesses to wanting to unzip his skin and wear it like a onesie while letting his own bigotry get in the way of treating Teri (who’s “fierce, witty, beautiful, unashamed — everything I was not”) the way she deserves?
Midway through the series, in the fourth of seven half-hour episodes, Baby Reindeer reveals the reasons for Donny’s strange behavior, both radically subverting our expectations and implicating us in the process. We learn that five years earlier at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Donny met a powerful older man, a television writer named Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill), who professed to love Donny’s brand of wacky comedy and convinced him he could become a star. Darrien encouraged Donny to experiment with increasingly hard-core drugs, all while alternately lavishing his writing with praise and forcing him to do brutal rewrites without pay. Donny became so enraptured with Darrien’s promises that he kept returning to the apartment where, once Donny had been incapacitated by the drugs, Darrien began sexually abusing him.
“I would love to pretend that’s as far as it went,” Donny’s voice-over intones while he lies crumpled and crying on the floor of Darrien’s apartment after the first assault. But he kept going back. Baby Reindeer is shot and scored like a horror movie with disconcerting, unflattering close-ups and off-kilter angles; Donny is trapped both by Martha’s real-time surveillance and the emotional aftereffects of Darrien’s abuse in that strange red room.
Many times throughout the show, Donny in voice-over confesses to all the things he should have done differently: “I should have … I wish I had …I would love to tell you …” At the end of the fourth episode, we revisit the show’s opening, when Donny first went to the police, and his voice-over tallies up everything he should have reported — Martha’s attack on Teri, her groping him on the canal, all her previous crimes — “but I just didn’t.” And it was because “I couldn’t stand the irony of reporting her but not him” — i.e., his abuser. He continues, “There was always a sense that she was ill, she couldn’t help it, while he was a pernicious manipulative groomer. To admit to her was to admit to him, and I hadn’t admitted him to anybody yet.”
Suddenly, the show’s overarching narrative clicks into place, and it’s clear why Donny’s story begins at the police station with a cop asking, “Why didn’t you report this until now?” It’s a question asked of countless victims, all with their own unique and uniquely devastating reasons for why they initially kept silent.
Not only does Donny doubt that a carceral solution could assist him or, especially, Martha (”I think she really needs help,” he tells the police officer) — he’s also unable to fully condemn Martha for her actions when his own are so bound up in self-hatred. Martha had seen him the way he wanted to be seen — as a “normal,” covetable straight man — at a time when his shame from being sexually abused had become inextricably entangled with his shame over his burgeoning bisexuality. Donny, like all men, has grown up to believe that it’s shameful to have experienced sexual abuse and that it’s shameful to be attracted to trans women; both are the dictates of a sexist, homophobic, and transphobic culture. So Donny conflates the twinned “unmanly” shames, worrying that his attraction to Teri and to multiple genders comes from a place of deviance awakened by rape. His taste in porn changes, as do his hookups; he puts himself into increasingly risky situations “in a desperate search for the truth.” Donny reasons that if he’s “passed around like a whore,” he can further sever his mind from his body: “Who cares if it happened before; it’s happened a ton of times now, so what does it matter?” But he knows better. It matters because he’s started to see himself the way his abuser did: as corrupted, degraded, inhuman. And now “I was stuck, surrounded by Pilsner misogynists so heteronormative I could do nothing but crave their approval.”
Donny’s jokes about Martha for his bro-y coworkers look different after episode four, when we learn his performative straight douchiness came from a place of great pain. “Someone hurt you, didn’t they?” Martha asks Donny on their first and only doomed coffee date; she demands the names of those who’ve wronged him, then grows hysterical, screaming and banging on the table. She asks him the same question when, following the reveal of Darrien’s abuses, Donny starts masturbating to fantasies of showing up at Martha’s flat and having sex with her while she stares adoringly up at him. He isn’t attracted to Martha but to abjection, to his own debasement. He feels at once superior to her and sorry for her, turned on by her devotion and attention as well as by her scorn; she both flatters both the parts of himself that want to pretend he’s a Real Man and affirms his own self-hatred. Martha is either giggling, complimenting Donny’s “cute wee bum,” or screaming that the only men who say no to her are either gay or blind. “I’m not gay, Martha, Jesus,” Donny says. Then she gropes him.
On a first watch, you might wonder why Donny didn’t shove Martha away; I certainly did. Rewatching that scene in context of the entire series is even more upsetting: Donny’s eyes glaze over in near tears while Martha violates him and tells him approvingly that his heart is racing. “I heard it,” she emails him later, triumphant, as certain as Donny is that because his body reacted, he must have liked it.
I haven’t been this bowled over by a half-hour series about the complications of sexual abuse and surviving trauma since Michaela Coel’s extraordinary HBO series, I May Destroy You. Like Baby Reindeer, I May Destroy You’s stars its writer and creator; both shows depict survivors of sexual violence attempting to piece together what happened to them and how and if to tell their stories; both end in ways that refuse simple bad-guy/good-guy dichotomies. I May Destroy You’s finale, in which Arabella, a writer, explores three different fantasies on the page about confronting her rapist, “doesn’t offer sanitized closure so much as an evolution of the self that involves radical empathy for ourselves and others,” as Vulture critic Angelica Jade Bastién wrote in 2020.
I think Baby Reindeer does something similar. When Donny first gave Martha that cup of tea, he had been feeling sorry for her, seeing and sensing her sadness and vulnerability — things that Martha had sensed in him as well. Their twinned self-loathing, as well as both of their desire to be seen, affirmed, and loved, keeps them in a dangerous, obsessive vortex that threatens to swallow everything Donny loves. He might never have finally reported one of Martha’s direct threats of violence if she hadn’t also been threatening his family. Protecting himself was never enough of an impetus because he didn’t think his own life mattered enough.
Baby Reindeer is a loose adaptation of Gadd’s Olivier Award–winning play of the same name, out of Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, about his real-life experiences of being stalked; it also borrows elements from Monkey See, Monkey Do, Gadd’s one-man show from 2016, in which he recounts his story of sexual abuse while running on a treadmill pursued by a gorilla. “We live in a time where everyone’s trying to be perfect,” Gadd told British GQ earlier this month about coming to terms with his own accountability in his story. “It’s interesting when someone holds their hands up and says, ‘I made some mistakes.’ There was a version of the show I was going to do in 2019 that makes me look good, where I offer her a cup of tea and oh woe is me. But that felt disingenuous and the second you start to write art from a place where you’re lying, I don’t think the art’s going to be any good.”
The reason this show works, and works so remarkably, devastatingly well, is because Gadd was willing to reveal his darkest shames, his internalized bigotry, his crippling self-doubt, every moment when he could have made a different, better choice. The story is Gadd-as-Donny figuring out how to tell the story to others and, perhaps more importantly, to himself. Baby Reindeer doesn’t set out to score political points, or to “raise awareness,” but to expose the complexities and contradictions of the human heart. Some viewers have already begun giving it the inevitable true-crime treatment, digging up the “real” Martha and speculating about Gadd’s abuser, much to Gadd and Gunning’s chagrin; treating this narrative like a whodunit and an excuse to gawk at somebody’s severe mental illness does ita disservice, reducing its characters to one-dimensional villains and victims. Real life is never that simple; great art tells us so.
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