Everything
It’s always the quiet achievers, or those that started out as niche exercises in television, that end up being the most impactful. Cases in point, Succession. The OA. The Bear. Severance. And you can now add Baby Reindeer on Netflix to that list too.
It all begins in a pub, too. Perhaps that familiar setting is what makes what comes next become so unsettling.
When Donny Dunn, a portrayal by Richard Gadd, a struggling comedian, serves a disheveled woman named Martha a complimentary cup of tea, he inadvertently sets the stage for a chilling saga of obsession and mental unraveling.
Martha, played with unnerving intensity by Jessica Gunning, is a purported high-flying lawyer whose financial instability seems at odds with her profession. Their encounter occurs in the low-lit corners of a pub—an environment that unwittingly becomes the incubator for Martha’s escalating fixation with Donny. The narrative accelerates as Martha, armed with Donny’s email address, inundates him with a deluge of messages marked by the haunting tagline, “sent from my iPhone”—a device she startlingly does not possess.
This disquieting detail hints at the psychological horror that underpins Baby Reindeer. The show, an adaptation of Gadd’s critically lauded one-man play first unveiled at the Edinburgh Fringe, distills the harrowing experience of his real-life stalking into a narrative that’s both unsettling and magnetic. The transition from stage to screen brings a new dimension to the tale, rendering Martha not as an absent presence signified by an empty bar stool, but as a flesh-and-blood antagonist whose every grimace and glare is a study in manipulation.
Jessica Gunning’s portrayal is a tour de force, oscillating between pitiable vulnerability and chilling malevolence. Her performance, coupled with Gadd’s raw, self-reflective portrayal of Donny, transforms the series into a narrative labyrinth where moral boundaries are not just crossed but redrawn. The episodes are crafted with a cinematographic flair that mirrors the horror genre—tight close-ups and skewed angles create an atmosphere laden with foreboding.
Gadd, who both penned and stars in the series, revisits the darkest corridors of his past, confronting his demons on screen with a candor that’s as compelling as it is courageous. The storyline does not merely recount events but delves into the murky waters of culpability and consent, pushing the audience to question not just the actions of the stalker but the complicity of the stalked.
